Quotes from Alan Furst

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

I've never lived in Eastern Europe, although both my wife and I have ancestors in Poland and Russia - but I can see the scenes I create.

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.

The way I work: I pick a country. I learn the political history - I mean I really learn it; I read until it sinks in. Once I read the political history, I can project and find the clandestine history. And then I people it with the characters.

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 read very little contemporary anything... I don't think I read what other people read, but then why would I, considering what I do?

I read very little contemporary anything.

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

I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.

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.

Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying

There's a French saying, 'Où le Dieu a vous semé, il faut savoir fleurir.' Let's see, 'Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower'...

One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.

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

But the world doesn't run on logic, it runs on the seven deadly sins and the weather. - Alan Furst; Red Gold

Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen.

Live today, for tomorrow we die.

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.

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.

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.

When you are done living for yourself, only then do you learn that living for others is the privilege,' Renata

This year, of course, being 1936, there would be no figs.

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