John le Carre Quotes
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For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
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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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You should have died when I killed you.
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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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I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
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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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America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.
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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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Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.
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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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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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Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
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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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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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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 mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.
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I write and walk and swim and drink.
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To give the best of the day to your work is most important.
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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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've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.
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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 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've always had difficulties with female characters.