Alan Furst Quotes

What I have to offer as a writer/director is the stuff with the feeling in it.

My first seven novels were contemporary spiritual novels, my next nine had strong elements of fantasy, and now I'm writing thrillers, more as a choice to spread my wings than anything. Writers, like good wine, should mature with age.

You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.

One likes to think one grows as a writer as one ages, else all you get is an 'old' young writer. Beyond that is the changing landscape of the universe and the stories I choose to tell.

To this day, 'The Duke and I' remains particularly close to my heart; I felt it was the novel in which my writing took a huge leap forward.

Good authors mature over time: it does take awhile.

As long as your storytelling and emotional depth are intact, that's what people will focus on.

I wanted to make comics that get at feelings that connect to the deepest moments of our lives, reading Tolstoy, Flaubert, Flannery O'Connor, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov and Carver to help gain the confidence to figure it out. I knew, however, the most doomed approach would be to simply create stories that felt 'literary.'

In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next.

I started realizing that one of the great things about opera is that if you make the right kind of story, you can still have this kind of abstract subliminal quality to take you on a journey, but you can root it just enough in a particular situation, a particular kind of real situation that a person might have, or a particular context in the real world.

From personal experience, I completely agree that it is often easier to go for monotone sadness. When I was starting out, I wrote a gazillion short stories that ran the gamut of human suffering - drug addiction, child abuse, terminal illness, loved ones dying by all manner of misfortune, etc. In hindsight, it's clear that I mistook the power of the situation for the power of the story.

What I think networks do so well are big, fun, accessible, invite everybody into the tent kinds of storytelling, akin to an early Spielberg movie or a Michael Crichton novel. That's not to say that there aren't scary parts 'cause there are, and that there aren't sexy parts and edgy parts, just like early Spielberg would have, but there's a lot of heart, a lot of emotion and complicated characters.

All fiction, if it's successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. Emotion is really what fiction is all about. That's not to say fiction can't be thoughtful, or present some interesting or provocative ideas to make us think. But if you want to present an intellectual argument, nonfiction is a better tool. You can drive a nail with a shoe but a hammer is a better tool for that. But fiction is about emotional resonance, about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level.

Levity, you need levity to feel anything. You need to laugh before you cry. I think films that take themselves too seriously without any levity are missing an important ingredient to the potential emotional impact of their stories.

I try to keep my characters raising more questions than giving answers. I don't want to leave too much on the table. I want you to have your connection and your secret understanding of the character.

I like a drama. And I think that's the basis of good films, or good plays, is to have a nice drama.

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

A Mozart symphony is very much like a Pixar movie - in the sense that Pixar movies are hugely successful because they operate on several levels at the same time.

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

Character, I think, is the single most important thing in fiction. You might read a book once for its interesting plot—but not twice.

When you're a kid going on being an adult, everything radiates so deeply and resonates so passionately, and I like the opportunity to tell those stories.

A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

I've done a number of films. I've been around this. I think the biggest challenge is just getting the script right, the way that you want the script to be. It's really about capturing the complexity of emotions and creating the kind of characters that people will want to watch every week.

I've never really been a fan of violence. I'm more into the characters and their journey and those kinds of movies don't really allow for that. It's a different focus.

The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.