John le Carre Quotes

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John le Carre

Profession : Writer

Birth : October 19, 1931

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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.

John le Carre