Top 45 Alan Furst Quotes

For John le Carre, it was always who’s betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the ’30s, it’s a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.

I don’t just want my books to be about the ’30s and ’40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as ’40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

I wrote three mysteries and then a contemporary spy novel that was unbelievably derivative – completely based on ‘The Conversation,’ the movie with Gene Hackman. Amazingly, the character in the book looks exactly like… Gene Hackman.

I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

I like to say I sit alone in my room, and I fight the language. I am wildly obsessive. I can’t let something go if I think it’s wrong.

I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.

I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels – the late ’30s and World War II.

I don’t inflict horrors on readers. In my research, I’ve uncovered truly terrible documentations of cruelty and torture, but I leave that offstage. I always pull back and let the reader imagine the details. We all know to one degree or another the horrors of war.

Yes, I’m a reasonably good self-taught historian of the 1930s and ’40s. I’ve never wanted to write about another time or place. I wouldn’t know what to say about contemporary society.

For something that’s supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.

What you get in the Cold War is ‘the wilderness of mirrors’ where you have to figure out what’s good and what’s evil. That’s good for John le Carre, but not me.

The 1930s was a funny time. People knew they might not live for another six months, so if they were attracted to one another, there was no time to dawdle.

What I discovered is I don’t like to repeat lead characters because one of the most pleasurable things in a book to me is learning about the lead.

People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it.

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I’m a genre writer.

Women take great care of themselves in France. It’s a culture dedicated to making women beautiful and to manners.

I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

You can’t make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.

I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn’t have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments – mainly murder mysteries.

I would have loved to have another 10 Eric Ambler books.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know what to write.

You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.

I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.

Seattle’s support system got me through those early, difficult years. It was a very funky, very friendly, very relaxed place that had it all for a writer.

Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?

Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It’s just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don’t really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.

I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.

When I read period material – and it ain’t on Google – I am always alert for that one incredible detail. I’ll read a whole book and get three words out of it, but they’ll be three really good words.

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.

I don’t work Sunday any more… The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death.

In the 1930s, there were so many different conflicts going on between the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Romanians and so on.

I’m not really a mass market writer.

If you read the history of the national Socialist party, they’re all people who felt like life should have been better to them. They’re disappointed, vengeful, angry.

You have to have heart’s passion to write a novel.

I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.

Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn’t work that way.

I had the experience of a monk copying documents, applying myself assiduously to my work. And I thought whatever happened, happened – this is just what I do in my life.

Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.

When I went to prep school in New York City, I had to ride the subway and learned how to do homework on the train. I can work and read through anything.

I read very little contemporary anything.

My father died when I was young, and my mother, Ruth, went to work in an office selling theater and movie parties. She put me through private school, Horace Mann, in Riverdale. She sent me to camp so that I would learn to compete. She was a lioness, and I was her cub.

I love the gray areas, but I like the gray areas as considered by bright, educated, courageous people.

Venice has always fascinated me. Every country in Europe then was run by kings and the Vatican except Venice, which was basically run by councils. I’ve always wondered why.

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It’s where it all began and ended.