John le Carre Quotes
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I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.
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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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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
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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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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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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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The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
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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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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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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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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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You should have died when I killed you.
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I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.
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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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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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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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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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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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I suffer from the same frustration that every decent American suffers from. That is, that you begin to wonder whether decent liberal instincts, decent humanitarian instincts, can actually penetrate the right-wing voice, get through the steering of American opinion by the mass media.
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Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.
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The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.