I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer..

Live today, for tomorrow we die..

I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything..

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 al….

Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying.

Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them..

The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and pea….

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 t….

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended..

If you can live in Paris, maybe you should..

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I'm gonna do 320, that….

You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic..

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….

I read very little contemporary anything..

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books..

You write a lot of books; you hope you get better..

Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus: the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what….

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, writt….

I'm not really a mass market writer..

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'….

If you're a writer, you're always working..