Best 24 quotes of Alan Furst on MyQuotes

Alan Furst

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    Alan Furst

    And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini's armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn't sure what came next. So, don't trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.

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    Alan Furst

    Good people don't spend their time being good. Good people want to spend their time mowing the lawn and playing with the dog. But bad people spend all their time being bad. It is all they think about.

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    Alan Furst

    I don't inflict horrors on readers.

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    Alan Furst

    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.

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    Alan Furst

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

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    Alan Furst

    I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books - there are a lot of people like that! That's my audience.

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    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.

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    Alan Furst

    I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don't want to be the person to stick that in your brain.

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    Alan Furst

    I invented the historical spy novel.

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    Alan Furst

    It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I'm gonna do 320, that's 160 days.

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    Alan Furst

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

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    Alan Furst

    Live today, for tomorrow we die.

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    Alan Furst

    Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus: the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said

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    Alan Furst

    The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.

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    Alan Furst

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

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    Alan Furst

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

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    Alan Furst

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

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    Alan Furst

    A moment comes, and if you wish to look at yourself as human, you must take some kind of action. Otherwise, you can read the newspapers and congratulate yourself on your good fortune.

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    Alan Furst

    At least, he thought, looking down at his feet, his socks were still in decent shape. It was the socks that went first. A whore he knew said that she only took customers whose socks were in good condition. One of Casson's fellow lodgers showed him how he used a pen to color in the skin that showed white in the holes.

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    Alan Furst

    But the world doesn't run on logic, it runs on the seven deadly sins and the weather. - Alan Furst; Red Gold

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    Alan Furst

    Having lived in a mythical country, a place neither here nor there, these intellectuals from Vilna and Gomel helped create another and called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Such a name! It was hardly a union. The Soviets - workers’ councils - ruled it for about six weeks; socialism impoverished everybody, and only machine guns kept the republics from turning into nations. But to Szarza and the rest it didn’t matter. He’d put his life on the line, preferring simply to die at the wrong end of a gun rather than the wrong end of a club, and for twelve years - until 1929, when Stalin finally took over - he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic, intellectual Jews actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer.

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    Alan Furst

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

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    Alan Furst

    In return for their faithful service, they would receive Red Army food rations, which amounted to a generous ladle, twice daily, from a cauldron into which all appropriated food was thrown. The stew boiled twenty-four hours a day, a fatty broth of onions, roosters, rabbits, dead horse, turnips - whatever they happened on in the course of their collecting forays - the Red Army essentially lived off the countryside.

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    Alan Furst

    We are afflicted with a darkness of the soul and fall in love with our pain.