Alan Furst
Alan Furst
Alan Furstis an American author of historical spy novels. Furst has been called "an heir to the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene," whom he cites along with Joseph Roth and Arthur Koestler as important influences. Most of his novels since 1988 have been set just prior to or during the Second World War and he is noted for his successful evocations of Eastern European peoples and places during the period from 1933 to 1944...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 February 1941
CountryUnited States of America
I read very little contemporary anything.
My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.
I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
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.
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
Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.
For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.
Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.
I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.
I don't work Sunday any more... The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death.
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.
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.
I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.
Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.