Top 40 Alan Furst Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Live today, for tomorrow we die.”

— Alan Furst

2. “Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying.”

— Alan Furst

3. “I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.”

— Alan Furst

4. “I invented the historical spy novel.”

— Alan Furst

5. “The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.”

— Alan Furst

6. “And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn’t sure what came next. So, don’t trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.”

— Alan Furst

7. “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

8. “This land, like so much of the French countryside, was a painting, but Mercier felt his heart touched with melancholy and realized, not for the first time, that beautiful places were hard on lonely people.”

— Alan Furst

9. “When you’re looking for somebody and you find yourself in contact with people you’ve never met, you are getting close.”

— Alan Furst

10. “Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus: the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said.”

— Alan Furst

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

— Alan Furst

12. “If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.”

— Alan Furst

13. “Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.”

— Alan Furst

14. “If you’re a writer, you’re always working.”

— Alan Furst

15. “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

16. “But the world doesn’t run on logic, it runs on the seven deadly sins and the weather. – Alan Furst; Red Gold.”

— Alan Furst

17. “One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.”

— Alan Furst

18. “When you are done living for yourself, only then do you learn that living for others is the privilege,’ Renata.”

— Alan Furst

19. “I read very little contemporary anything.”

— Alan Furst

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

— Alan Furst

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

— Alan Furst

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22. “I don’t just want my books to be about the ’30s and ’40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as ’40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.”

— Alan Furst

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

— Alan Furst

24. “You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.”

— Alan Furst

25. “A certain type – he knew them all too well from years of experience as a detective, he knew how they acted, how they spoke, how their minds worked. These were people who would do anything to win at what they saw as the game of life, who had no allegiance to anyone or anything beyond themselves, who were gifted liars, who could scheme their way into almost anyone’s confidence, then betray them without hesitation.”

— Alan Furst

26. “The sun?” Goldman said in an unguarded moment. “I hear they’ve shot it.”

— Alan Furst

27. “I don’t inflict horrors on readers.”

— Alan Furst

28. “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.”

— Alan Furst

29. “The best Paris I know now is in my head.”

— Alan Furst

30. “I’m not really a mass market writer.”

— Alan Furst

31. “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

32. “I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.”

— Alan Furst

33. “We are afflicted with a darkness of the soul and fall in love with our pain.”

— Alan Furst

34. “He was, in military life, a sergeant. Casson had already guessed that by the time he got around to mentioning it. A sergeant: good at getting things done. By the book so long as it worked. By being crooked if that’s what it took.”

— Alan Furst

35. “When a diplomat says ‘yes’ he means ‘maybe.’ When a diplomat says ‘maybe’ he means ‘no.’ But if a diplomat says ‘no’ he’s no diplomat.”

— Alan Furst

36. “Earlier, during a lull in business, Morath had laid out the details of Kolovitzky’s letter and the two of them had discussed strategy, coming up with the plan that couldn’t go wrong and what to do once it did. In.”

— Alan Furst

37. “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.”

— Alan Furst

38. “The lawyer Thien, when Morath was ushered into his office by a junior member of the staff, turned out to be an ancient bag of bones held upright only by means of a stiff, iron-coloured suit.”

— Alan Furst

39. “Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.”

— Alan Furst

40. “With time, he developed the instincts of a priest: evil existed; the task was to work productively within its confines.”

— Alan Furst