Alan Furst Quotes

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.

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

They had refused payment, their spying was an act of conscience. Sincere Christians, German Lutherans, they had watched with horror as the Nazis violated every precept sacred to them. .... They didn't care to be paid. They had prayed together for hours, they explained, down on their knees, trying to make this decision, but now it was made. The people who led Germany were evil, and they were obliged, by their faith, to act against them.

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.

The only way you can handle big kinds of questions is to simply state briefly what the truth was. What am I going to tell you about the Holocaust? Would you like three pages about it? I don't think you would ... I don't think anything different than you think - it was horrible.

We're the roughest people in the way we play and live, and that is because Americans come from people who all got up one morning and went 5,000 miles, and that was a time in the 19th century when it wasn't so easy to do.

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

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

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

I started out when I was 29 - too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.

He was, in military life, a sergeant. Casson had already guessed that by the time he got around to mentioning it. A sergeant: good at getting things done. By the book so long as it worked. By being crooked if that's what it took.

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.

Spying came to him as making love comes to other men. It is his belief, in fact, that his father may have had relations with the Okhrana, the czar's intelligence service, though his murder by the Turks was haphazard - simply one act in a village slaughter. But Avram knew them, whether they were Turkish Aghas or British officers, he always understood how they worked, where their vulnerabilities lay.

If I'm a genre writer, I'm at the edge. In the end, they do work like genre fiction. You have a hero, there's a love interest, there's always a chase, there's fighting of some kind. You don't have to do that in a novel. But you do in a genre novel.

He'd grown up an untroubled believer, but the war had put an end to that. What God could permit such misery and slaughter? But, in time, he had found consolation in a God beyond understanding, and prayed for those he'd lost, for those he loved, and an end to evil in the world.

Le Carre's voice - patrician, cold, brilliant and amused - was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction.

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

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

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.

European starvation was rather more cunning and wore a series of clever masks: death came by drink, by tuberculosis, by the knife, by despair in all its manifestations.

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.

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.

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

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.

It was dawn by the time the detective showed up; tired and weary. Tired because he'd been called from his bed before dawn, weary because he'd spent his life looking at the bad side of human nature and that wasn't going to change.

I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.

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.

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.

They drove on, through pretty Schwabisch villages. Every one of them had its Christbaum, a tall evergreen in the center of town, with candles lit as darkness fell, and a star on top. There were also candles in every window, and red-berried holly weaths hung on the doors. By the side of the road, at the entry to each village, stood a sign attacking the Jews. This was, Mercier thought, a kind of competition, for none of the signs were the same. Juden dirfen nicht bleiben - 'Jews must not stay here' - was followed by Wer die Juden unterstuzt fordert den Kommunissmus, 'Who helps the Jews helps communism,' then the dramatic 'This flat-footed stranger, with kinky hair and hooked nose, he shall not our land enjoy, he must leave, he must leave.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

If you're a writer, you're always working.

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

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

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.

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

A certain type - he knew them all too well from years of experience as a detective, he knew how they acted, how they spoke, how their minds worked. These were people who would do anything to win at what they saw as the game of life, who had no allegiance to anyone or anything beyond themselves, who were gifted liars, who could scheme their way into almost anyone's confidence, then betray them without hesitation.

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.

Live today, for tomorrow we die.

I'm not really a mass market writer.

I look for the dark story, where something secret was done. I read and read and pick up the trail of a true story. I use nothing but true stories. They are so much better than phony ones.

This land, like so much of the French countryside, was a painting, but Mercier felt his heart touched with melancholy and realized, not for the first time, that beautiful places were hard on lonely people.

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

I don't inflict horrors on readers.

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

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.

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

You could be a victim, you could be a hero, you could be a villain, or you could be a fugitive. But you could not just stand by. If you were in Europe between 1933 and 1945, you had to be something.

In the early dusk of winter, Mercier climbed into an Opel with German plates. The young driver called himself Stefan and said he was from an emigre family that had settled in Besancon. 'In thirty-three,' he added. 'The minute Hitler took power, my father got the suitcases down. He was a socialist politicians, and he knew what was coming. Then, after we settled in France, the people you work for showed up right away, they've kept me busy ever since.

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.

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.

[on chess]

He had learned the moves, back in Vidin, from Levitzky the tailor, who called it "the Russian game." Thus, the old man pointed out, the weak were sacrificed. The castles, fortresses, were obvious and basic; the bishops moved obliquely; the knights - an officer class - sought power in devious ways; the queen, second-in-command, was pure aggression; and the king, heart of it all, a helpless target, dependent totally on his forces for survival.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.

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.

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

There's a French saying, 'Où le Dieu a vous semé, il faut savoir fleurir.' Let's see, 'Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower'...

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

crossed borders like the wind. Yet it had happened, and Khristo finally understood how it had happened. Moving across the countryside made one prey, over time, to a series of small mishaps, none of them serious in and of itself, but cumulative over time. A few hours of sleep when one could manage it, a meal now and then, the insidious chill of the early spring, the constant forcing of the mind into a state of vigilance when all one craved was numbness, when not to think about anything seemed the most exquisite luxury the world had to offer.

spies and journalists were fated to go through life together, and it was sometimes hard to tell one from the other. Their jobs weren't all that different: they talked to politicians, developed sources in government bureaux, and dug around for secrets.

The best Paris I know now is in my head.

I just became what I call an 'anti-fascist novelist.' There is no word that covers both the fascists and the Communists, which mean different things to people, but of course they're the same: they're tyranny states.