Alan Furst

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

“I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.”

“I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.”

“I am there to entertain. I call my work high escape fiction; it's high, it's good - but it's escape, and I have no delusions about that. I have no ambition to be a serious writer, whatever that means.”

“For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.”

“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 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 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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”