The idea that someone is going to write me, and I’m not going to answer – I was just raised not to do that. We are the result of our upbringing, and my upbringing was very much to meet obligations… You just didn’t let things go. – Alan Furst
I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It’s an incredibly romantic and beautiful place. – Alan Furst
Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way. – Alan Furst
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. – Alan Furst
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. – 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. – Alan Furst
I had the experience of a monk copying documents, applying myself assiduously to my work. And I thought whatever happened, happened – this is just what I do in my life. – Alan Furst
I was raised on John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. Something about this genre – hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold – never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator. – Alan Furst
I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn’t have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments – mainly murder mysteries. – Alan Furst
I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington. – Alan Furst
I basically wrote five books with ‘Night Soldiers,’ called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript. – Alan Furst
I write about the period 1933-42, and I read books written during those years: books by foreign correspondents of the time, histories of the time written contemporaneously or just afterwards, autobiographies and biographies of people who were there, present-day histories of the period, and novels written during those times. – Alan Furst
Let me put it this way: I don’t plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can’t retire and do brain surgery – or at least he better not. – Alan Furst
My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else’s books. – Alan Furst