Alan Furst Quotes: top 76 famous quotes about Alan Furst

Alan Furst Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Alan Furst quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be. — Alan Furst

The brutalization of humans by other humans never fails to get to me in some angry-making way. It shot up in me like an explosion. — Alan Furst

For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years. — Alan Furst

I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated. — Alan Furst

With time, he developed the instincts of a priest: evil existed; the task was to work productively within its confines. — Alan Furst

I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist. — Alan Furst

People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it. — Alan Furst

It was a great softening, night and day it continued, a water funeral for the dying winter. — Alan Furst

I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel. — Alan Furst

A fat man with a Nazi party pin in his lapel played Cole Porter on a white piano. — Alan Furst

I've never lived in Eastern Europe, although both my wife and I have ancestors in Poland and Russia - but I can see the scenes I create. — Alan Furst

Well, he thought, one did what one had to do, so life went. No, one did what one had to do in order to do what one wanted to do - so life really went. — Alan Furst

I am a huge fan of Alan Furst. Furst is the best in the business
the most talented espionage novelist of our generation. — Vince Flynn

Russia might be characterized as a wicked beast of a nation, but it was a very large beast, and sometimes it thrashed its tail. — Alan Furst

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

when at last they'd had to admit to themselves that they'd made all the love they could, had been a last meal. Like — Alan Furst

A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know. — Alan Furst

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books. — Alan Furst

I read very little contemporary anything. — Alan Furst

I don't work Sunday any more ... The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death. — Alan Furst

My theory is that sometimes writers write books because they want to read them, and they aren't there to be read. And I think that was true of me. — Alan Furst

French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is. — Alan Furst

I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place. — Alan Furst

I'm not really a mass market writer. — Alan Furst

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it. — Alan Furst

I had a publishing history of murder mysteries. — Alan Furst

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

When you're looking for somebody and you find yourself in contact with people you've never met, you are getting close. — Alan Furst

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction. — Alan Furst

Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen. — Alan Furst

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

Fast-paced from start to finish, 'The Honourable Schoolboy' is fired by le Carre's conviction regarding evil done and its consequences. — Alan Furst

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

The sun?" Goldman said in an unguarded moment. "I hear they've shot it. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II. — Alan Furst

There were moments when Szara suspected that many idealists drawn to Communism were, at heart, people with an appetite for clandestine life. — Alan Furst

Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best. — Alan Furst

Charles McCarry is the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue - by the breadth of Alan Furst, by the fathom of Eric Ambler, by any measure. — P. J. O'Rourke

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. — Alan Furst

I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington. — Alan Furst

I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything. — Alan Furst

You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic. — Alan Furst

I would have loved to have another 10 Eric Ambler books. — Alan Furst

When you are done living for yourself, only then do you learn that living for others is the privilege,' Renata — Alan Furst

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

It made her - a bizarre trick - long for a past that was still in the future. — Alan Furst

I don't inflict horrors on readers. — Alan Furst

I've always liked lost, old New York. — Alan Furst

Live today, for tomorrow we die. — Alan Furst

Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way. — Alan Furst

I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer. — Alan Furst

I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt. — Alan Furst

When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality. — Alan Furst

Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them. — Alan Furst

If you're a writer, you're always working. — Alan Furst

I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that. — Alan Furst

Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying — Alan Furst

This year, of course, being 1936, there would be no figs. — Alan Furst

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

I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript. — Alan Furst

The best Paris I know now is in my head. — Alan Furst

I invented the historical spy novel. — Alan Furst

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

When a diplomat says 'yes' he means 'maybe.' When a diplomat says 'maybe' he means 'no.' But if a diplomat says 'no' he's no diplomat. — Alan Furst

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

If you can live in Paris, maybe you should. — Alan Furst

I was as you are now. A peasant. I sought the world. Because the alternative was to spend the rest of my life looking up a plowhorse's backside. — Alan Furst

I love the combination of the words 'spies' and 'Balkans.' It's like meat and potatoes. — Alan Furst

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

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel. — Alan Furst

Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

Whether they loved each other or not, they were lovers. And he was damned if he'd see her sucked into this brutal business. — Alan Furst

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write. — Alan Furst