Top 208 Quotes & Sayings by John le Carre
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English writer John le Carre.
Last updated on December 22, 2024.
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.
There was an ITV television production of the second novel I wrote, called 'Murder of Quality.' It was a little murder story set in a public school - I'd once taught at Eton, and I used that stuff.
'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.
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
A committee is an animal with four back legs.
I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.
Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.
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.
Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
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.
You should have died when I killed you.
I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no one else can make them.
America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.
Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.
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.
I've always had difficulties with female characters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.
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.
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
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.
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.
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.
But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
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.
The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.
Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.
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.
I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.
I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.
The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.
For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
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.
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.
A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.
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.
I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
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.
I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
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