Top 96 Quotes by Alan Furst

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

When I read period material - and it ain't on Google - I am always alert for that one incredible detail. I'll read a whole book and get three words out of it, but they'll be three really good words.

Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.

I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.

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

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.

In the 1930s, there were so many different conflicts going on between the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Romanians and so on.

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

I would have loved to have another 10 Eric Ambler books.

French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.