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.
From Alan Furst
I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.
People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it.
The 1930s was a funny time. People knew they might not live for another six months, so if they were attracted to one another, there was no time to dawdle.
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 could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.
You could be a victim, you could be a hero, you could be a villain, or you could be a fugitive. But you could not just stand by. If you were in Europe between 1933 and 1945, you had to be something.
My father died when I was young, and my mother, Ruth, went to work in an office selling theater and movie parties. She put me through private school, Horace Mann, in Riverdale. She sent me to camp so that I would learn to compete. She was a lioness, and I was her cub.
I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.
I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.
5 perspectives
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