John le Carre
I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even show passes to go in and out of the building.
I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.
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.
The merit of 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,' then - or its offence, depending where you stood - was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible.
Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.
Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.
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.
My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
I want to be like Ford Madox Ford. I want to be talking to somebody across a fire, and I want him to join me and listen to me, and if he is fidgeting in his chair, I know I am not doing my job. I am a storyteller, and I know most people like a story.
I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.
In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.
You should have died when I killed you.
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.
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.
The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
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.
I've always had difficulties with female characters.
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
If I had to put a name to it, I would wish that all my books were entertainments. I think the first thing you've got to do is grab the reader by the ear, and make him sit down and listen. Make him laugh, make him feel. We all want to be entertained at a very high level.
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.
By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.
In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.
Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.
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.
Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.
I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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.
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.
Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.
For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.Collection: Truth
When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.Collection: Ignorance
The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.Collection: Littles
By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.Collection: Lying
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.Collection: Writing
In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job.Collection: Jobs
There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.Collection: Believe
The only reward for love is the experience of loving.Collection: Love
Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are.Collection: Who We Are
A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.Collection: Sacrifice
I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.Collection: Clever
Multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world's sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders.Collection: Views
Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.Collection: Order