John le Carre Quotes
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You should have died when I killed you.
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Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
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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 don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
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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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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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SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.
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Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
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Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
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I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name.
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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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I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.
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More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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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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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.
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I write and walk and swim and drink.
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But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.
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Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.
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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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I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.
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I've always had difficulties with female characters.
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There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
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To give the best of the day to your work is most important.