He [John Le Carré] really paid tribute to the people who are willing to risk their own lives to fight injustice - they are greater men and women than I.
Generally women are better than men -- they have more character. I prefer men for some things, obviously, but women have a greater sense of honor and are more willing to take a chance with their lives.
I am indeed a fan of John le Carre's novels.
I will read anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carre, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker.
John le Carre's 'The Night Manager' is a relentlessly exhilarating thriller with profound emotional depths.
I think John le Carre is, at 77, the greatest living writer alive. He is a master craftsman.
I haven't seen too many American distance men on the international scene willing to take risks. I saw some U.S. women in Barcelona willing to risk, more than men. The Kenyans risk. Steve Prefontaine risked. I risked - I went through the first half of the Tokyo race just a second off my best 5000 time.
The secret of the creative life is how to feel at ease with your own embarrassment. We're all in the dirty laundry business and we're being paid to take risks and look silly. Race car drivers get paid to risk their lives in a more concrete way; we get paid to risk our lives in an emotional way.
I'm pretty omnivorous - in fact, I don't think of books in terms of genres. J. K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' books are no more Y.A. reading, to me, than John le Carre's 'Smiley' novels are spy stories.
What le Carré is so good at is unpicking something very specific about Englishness. That is almost part of why I think he wrote the novel. You can feel le Carré's anger that someone who has had the benefits of an English education and an English upbringing is using that privilege to basically do the worst things imaginable. There is an anger in the book about that.
In the daily lives of most men and women, fear plays a greater part than hope: they are more filled with the thought of the possessions that others may take from them, than of the joy that they might create in their own lives and in the lives with which they come in contact. It is not so that life should be lived.
In my lifetime, I have seen how greater liberty, greater justice, and greater respect ultimately does prevail, but it prevails only when people are willing to fight for it and willing to lose for it.
What you get in the Cold War is 'the wilderness of mirrors' where you have to figure out what's good and what's evil. That's good for John le Carre, but not me.
There's a blockbuster side to Knopf, whether it's P. D. James or John le Carre or our best-selling books. We try to sell our writers as aggressively as those houses regarded as commercial with a capital C.
For John le Carre, it was always who's betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the '30s, it's a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.
Of John Le Carre's books, I've only read 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,' and I haven't read anything by Graham Greene, but I've heard a great deal about how 'Your Republic Is Calling You' reminded English readers of those two writers. I don't really have any particular interest in Cold War spy novels.
These are men and women who are willing to risk their lives in defense of their country. And the fact that their orientation - sexual orientation's been held against them is a blot on our nation's reputation.