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
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.
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.
You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
I read very little contemporary anything.
I invented the historical spy novel.
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.
Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
I'm not really a mass market writer.
If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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.
Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended,
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
I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.