When I went to prep school in New York City, I had to ride the subway and learned how to do homework on the train. I can work and read through anything.
— Alan Furst
Venice has always fascinated me. Every country in Europe then was run by kings and the Vatican except Venice, which was basically run by councils. I've always wondered why.
Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.
I've always liked lost, old New York.
I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.
'The Levanter' features some of the strongest action scenes to be found in Ambler - who can, in some of his fiction, stay in one place for a whole novel.
I love the combination of the words 'spies' and 'Balkans.' It's like meat and potatoes.
I figured I would always be a candidate for man of the year in the virtue-is-its-own-reward category. What that did was force me to concentrate on the work.
We're the roughest people in the way we play and live, and that is because Americans come from people who all got up one morning and went 5,000 miles, and that was a time in the 19th century when it wasn't so easy to do.
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.
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.
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've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.
When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.
For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.
I've never lived in Eastern Europe, although both my wife and I have ancestors in Poland and Russia - but I can see the scenes I create.
I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.
When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.
The way I work: I pick a country. I learn the political history - I mean I really learn it; I read until it sinks in. Once I read the political history, I can project and find the clandestine history. And then I people it with the characters.
For John le Carre, it was always who's betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the '30s, it's a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.
I like to say I sit alone in my room, and I fight the language. I am wildly obsessive. I can't let something go if I think it's wrong.
I look for the dark story, where something secret was done. I read and read and pick up the trail of a true story. I use nothing but true stories. They are so much better than phony ones.
Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.
Seattle's support system got me through those early, difficult years. It was a very funky, very friendly, very relaxed place that had it all for a writer.
I love the gray areas, but I like the gray areas as considered by bright, educated, courageous people.
French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.
I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.
I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.
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.
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.
Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.
I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn't have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments - mainly murder mysteries.
I would have loved to have another 10 Eric Ambler books.
I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.
I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.
Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.
I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.
The brutalization of humans by other humans never fails to get to me in some angry-making way. It shot up in me like an explosion.
Fast-paced from start to finish, 'The Honourable Schoolboy' is fired by le Carre's conviction regarding evil done and its consequences.
The only way you can handle big kinds of questions is to simply state briefly what the truth was. What am I going to tell you about the Holocaust? Would you like three pages about it? I don't think you would... I don't think anything different than you think - it was horrible.
I had the experience of a monk copying documents, applying myself assiduously to my work. And I thought whatever happened, happened - this is just what I do in my life.
I read very little contemporary anything... I don't think I read what other people read, but then why would I, considering what I do?
Women take great care of themselves in France. It's a culture dedicated to making women beautiful and to manners.
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 could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.
People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it.
Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?
I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.
Yes, I'm a reasonably good self-taught historian of the 1930s and '40s. I've never wanted to write about another time or place. I wouldn't know what to say about contemporary society.
My theory is that sometimes writers write books because they want to read them, and they aren't there to be read. And I think that was true of me.
