John le Carre Quotes

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John le Carre

Profession : Writer

Birth : October 19, 1931

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.

John le Carre

To give the best of the day to your work is most important.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.

John le Carre

It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of 'The Wind in the Willows,' which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital.

John le Carre

It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.

John le Carre

I made an awful mess of my first marriage. It was hard to live with me being me. I was so abnormal. I mean, most writers struggle. I hadn't struggled. I couldn't suddenly go down to the PEN Club and behave like a normal human being, because most of those guys were struggling to make a couple of thousand pounds a year.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

'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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre