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" 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

Way

Surgeon

Plan

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

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

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

" Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that? "

Alan Furst

Wolves

How

" If you can live in Paris, maybe you should. "

" I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer. "

" I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript. "

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

" 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. "

" I invented the historical spy novel. "

" Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Seattle's support system got me through those early, difficult years. It was a very funky, very friendly, very relaxed place that had it all for a writer. "

Alan Furst

Seattle

Support

" You write a lot of books; you hope you get better. "

" I read very little contemporary anything. "

" 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

Land

World

" Le Carre's voice - patrician, cold, brilliant and amused - was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction. "

" The best Paris I know now is in my head. "

" If you read the history of the national Socialist party, they're all people who felt like life should have been better to them. They're disappointed, vengeful, angry. "

" Venice has always fascinated me. Every country in Europe then was run by kings and the Vatican except Venice, which was basically run by councils. I've always wondered why. "

" 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. "

" When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality. "