140 Quotes by Alan Furst

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.

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.

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.

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

I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

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

I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

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

The best Paris I know now is in my head.