I figured I would always be a candidate for man of the year in the virtue-is-its-own-reward category. What that did was force me to concentrate on the work. – Alan Furst
For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ every few years. – Alan Furst
I don’t work Sunday any more… The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death. – 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. – 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. – Alan Furst
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. – Alan Furst
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. – Alan Furst
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. – Alan Furst
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. – Alan Furst
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. – Alan Furst
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. – 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
Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that? – Alan Furst
I’ve evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story – my publisher, Random House, has urged that. – Alan Furst
My grandmother, whom I adored, and who partly raised me, loved Liberace, and she watched Liberace every afternoon, and when she watched Liberace, she’d get dressed up and put on makeup because I think she thought if she could see Liberace, Liberace could see her. – Alan Furst
I read very little contemporary anything… I don’t think I read what other people read, but then why would I, considering what I do? – Alan Furst
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. – 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
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. – 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
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
The 1930s was a funny time. People knew they might not live for another six months, so if they were attracted to one another, there was no time to dawdle. – Alan Furst