John le Carre Quotes
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Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.
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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
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It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.
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When I was 16 or 17, anyone could have had me if they sang the right song and recruited me in the right way. Which is why I've always had a sneaking understanding for people who took the wrong route. That doesn't mean to say I took it or even contemplated it myself.
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My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.
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If you're growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended back.
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The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.
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The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
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Writers are two-home men - they want a place outside and a place within.
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I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.
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I think I'm in the same mood as ever, but in some ways more mature. I guess you could say that, at 65, when you've seen the world shape up as I have, there are only two things you can do: laugh or kill yourself.
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If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
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When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.
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You should have died when I killed you.
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I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no one else can make them.
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People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.
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Well, certainly I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.
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When you are brought up as a frozen child, you go on freezing. It wasn't until I had my four sons, who have brought me immense joy, that I began to thaw. That I realised how utterly extraordinary my childhood was.
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The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received.
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It is my writing dilemma. The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.
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I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.
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I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.
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America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.
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We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.