Top 60 John le Carre Quotes

I do believe very much in movie as a one-man-show. I think that where I’ve watched movie go wrong, it’s usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

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.

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.

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.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

I’ve had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.

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.

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.

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.

Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader’s daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.

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.

I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.

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.

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.

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

I don’t know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.

I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies.

I’ve always had difficulties with female characters.

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.

‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.

America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.

For better or worse, I’ve been involved in the description of political conflict.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven’t made is to talk about the unwritten book.

In the ’60s – and right up to the present day – the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a state secret. To divulge it is a crime. The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them.

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.

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.

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

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.

You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it’s not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.

I wrote ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.

Writers are two-home men – they want a place outside and a place within.

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.

Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.

But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.

I happen to write by hand. I don’t even type.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

Once you’ve lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It’s a mentality, a double standard of existence.

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

I think that where I’ve watched a movie go wrong, it’s usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

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.

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.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

We lie to one another every day, in the sweetest way, often unconsciously. We dress ourselves and compose ourselves in order to present ourselves to one another.

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.

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.