I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else’s books.
If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
I read very little contemporary anything.
I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I’m a genre writer.
One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn’t sure what came next. So, don’t trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.
Live today, for tomorrow we die.
I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don’t want to be the person to stick that in your brain.
I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.
I don’t just want my books to be about the ’30s and ’40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as ’40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.
You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.
I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.
Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying.
Good people don’t spend their time being good. Good people want to spend their time mowing the lawn and playing with the dog. But bad people spend all their time being bad. It is all they think about.
I don’t inflict horrors on readers.
If you’re a writer, you’re always working.
I invented the historical spy novel.
I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.