A biography for Alan Fursthasn’t been written yet.
“Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?”
“Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.”
“I don't inflict horrors on readers. In my research, I've uncovered truly terrible documentations of cruelty and torture, but I leave that offstage. I always pull back and let the reader imagine the details. We all know to one degree or another the horrors of war.”
“I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.”
“I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books - there are a lot of people like that! That's my audience.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I read very little contemporary anything.”
“French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.”
“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.”
“I've always liked lost, old New York.”
“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.”
“But the world doesn't run on logic, it runs on the seven deadly sins and the weather. - Alan Furst; Red Gold”
“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.”
“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.”
“I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.”
“I'm not really a mass market writer.”
“I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.”
“Fast-paced from start to finish, 'The Honourable Schoolboy' is fired by le Carre's conviction regarding evil done and its consequences.”
“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.”