Alan Furst

“When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by ac...”

“Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.”

“My grandmother, whom I adored, and who partly raised me, loved Liberace, and she watched Liberace every afternoon, and when she watched Liberace, she'd get dressed up and put on makeup becau...”

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

“I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.”

“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 hau...”

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

“I'm not really a mass market writer.”

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

“For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.”

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

“Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles;...”

“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 fo...”

“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 clandestin...”

“When I went to prep school in New York City, I had to ride the subway and learned how to do homework on the train. I can work and read through anything.”

“Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.”

“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.”

“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 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 imag...”

“I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.”