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.

I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.

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

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

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

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

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

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.

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

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