John le Carre Quotes

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John le Carre

Profession : Writer

Birth : October 19, 1931

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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.

John le Carre

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

I've always had difficulties with female characters.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.

John le Carre

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

John le Carre

I write and walk and swim and drink.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre