Alan Furst Quotes

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

I think even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'

I tried to fortify myself with the best nonfiction and fiction I could lay my hands on, from the essays of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to the stories and novels of Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolano and Celine. Distinctive voices like these were a source of constant nourishment on all range of matters, from punctuation to philosophy.

Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.

I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

I think when I was 12, I started reading Evelyn Waugh, and I loved Evelyn Waugh so much, and I thought: 'This is how the world really is. If I could be Evelyn Waugh, then I would be happy.'

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

I love Toni Morrison and Jeanette Winterson. 'The Passion' is my favourite book.

Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn't mean you're dim - you may find that Graham Greene is more to your taste, or Stephen Hawking or Iris Murdoch or Ian Rankin. Dickens, Stephen King, whoever.

I am a rereader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Celine, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is so much to revisit. 'Ingrid Caven,' by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation. I used to read 'Morvern Callar,' by Alan Warner, every year - I adored that book.

I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.