John le Carre Quotes - Page 5

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.

I can't think of anybody worse to live with.

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.

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

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.

Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.

When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.

I've always had difficulties with female characters.

I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.

Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.

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.

Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.

I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

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.

Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.

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.

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.

A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.

Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire.

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.

There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.