Alan Furst Quotes

I've always loved spy stories. Who can resist?

Espionage and counterespionage go together like horse and carriage.

There is only one law of espionage—there are always going to be spies.

I'm sure, in real life, spying is boring - there's probably a lot of sitting around and plenty of paperwork. But the world seems to think that spying is exciting, and that's how movies get made.

I love the spy genre.

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

I've known several spies who have wanted to become novelists. And novelists who became spies, of course.

The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.

What I really found was that the one similarity between 'Covert Affairs' and 'Fair Game' is a deep love and admiration and fascination with the home life of a spy.

Since real spies are so good, you never really know what actual spying is. But I do think spying is a lot more dangerous than we are led to believe.

During the Cold War, we gathered information by listening to the Soviets, taking pictures of the Soviets, and we allowed our human intelligence to decline.

From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'

] The vast industry of mutual surveillance that grew up alongside the industry of mutual destruction is not about to disappear. The spies, like the weapons, are here to stay. And proliferate, sooner or later, whether we like it or not.

I never met a North Korean who didn’t like pornography. Supplying porn to North Korean officials to entice them to spy for America, along with money or whatever else it might take—yes I was willing to do that.

There are more foreign intelligence officers inside the US now, working against US interests, than there were at the height of the cold war.

In the espionage world whenever something works, it looks brilliant. Whenever it goes wrong, it always looks like a terrible bungle.

Charles Kiss is a legendary James Bond-style British spy. And McGrath is the young idealist who is given the task of following in his footsteps. It's a mission that forces McGrath to question everything he thought he believed in.

I've met enough KGB colonels in my life.

I grew up on all of the great spy movies and TV series of the Sixties - not just Bond, but Derek Flint and the Avengers and Modesty Blaise and the Man from UNCLE and on and on. Every time I sit down to work on Cinderella, I'm writing a love letter to all of those characters.

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

With stealth technology, the U.S. could spy on its Cold War adversaries without running the risk of getting caught.

What you get in the Cold War is 'the wilderness of mirrors' where you have to figure out what's good and what's evil. That's good for John le Carre, but not me.

I saw a limit to what I was giving as kind of a scam I was running on the KGB, by giving them people that I knew were their double agents fed to us.

Since that time I have had continuous contact with the persons who were completely unknown to me, except that I knew they would hand whatever information I gave them to the Russian authorities.

Who would have thought that in the 1950s, Burbank was a hotbed of international espionage?