A Quote by 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.
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.
Well, he's got a much bigger circus to play with, and he has a lot more financing available, and he has a lot more time available. I think that makes a huge difference. I think he instinctively knows how to make films and all the different ways that you can make stuff. He's very gadget-wise, and he's very smart about all the different things that are available to a filmmaker nowadays, and he makes very good use of them. He has a theater in his house, for God's sake. It has proper curtains on it and everything. It's pretty wild.
I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.
Our instinct as human beings is to provide answers, to ease tension. As writers our job is the opposite, to create tension and not dispel it immediately.
I think both of my parents are unique in the way they don't live their lives as celebrities. They're both artists, first and foremost. My mom lives a very private life. So does my father. You don't really see them in the tabloids or anything like that. I think that's definitely a decision you can make.
I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.
If you have the personalities down, you understand them and identify with them; you can stick them in any situation and have a pretty good idea of how they're going to respond. Then it's just a matter of sanding and polishing up the jokes. But if you've got more ambiguous characters or stock stereotypes, the plastic comes through and they don't work as well. These two characters clicked for me almost immediately and I feel very comfortable working with them.
You think people can work all day and then pick up their kids at child care or wherever, and get home, and then still manage to sandwich in an eight-hour vote? Well, Republicans, I guess, can do that, because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives.
Talking about the fact that I get depressed or that I've had some suicidal issues in my life is not easy. I don't know of many comedians who are going all in on that. In some sense, I think I've maybe sacrificed some momentum doing that. In another sense, I'm in a place where if I can talk about that and if it helps some kid in a way that gives them some help that wasn't available to me when I was a kid, then I gotta do that. Put being a good person first. If you have a platform, use it for stuff that's noble and good and worth putting out in the world.
Without dignity our lives are only blinks of duration. But if we manage to lead a good life well, we create something more. We write a subscript to our mortality. We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands.
In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
I certainly think its very important that writers as citizens - not necessarily as writers, but just as ordinary citizens - should talk about things that matter to them.
I certainly think it's very important that writers as citizens - not necessarily as writers, but just as ordinary citizens - should talk about things that matter to them.
No one really knows what mattresses are meant to gain from their lives either. They are large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures that live quiet private lives in the marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta. Many of them get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. None of them seems to mind this and all of them are called Zem.
We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to government founded on force. There is not, among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment, and a sufficient belief in the unity of things to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable, and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation.
If it were possible to live without causing harm to any living being at all, then indeed we might well choose not to eat carrots or other vegetables. But that is not possible - merely by being alive, we necessarily cause harm to many, many beings: we step on them inadvertently, we breathe them in without noticing, we kill them when we brush our teeth or wash our bodies, etc.
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