QUOTES by John le Carre
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
Quote by -John le Carre
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.
Quote by -John le Carre
But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
Quote by -John le Carre
For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
Quote by -John le Carre
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.
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I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.
Quote by -John le Carre
Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.
Quote by -John le Carre
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Quote by -John le Carre
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.
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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.
Quote by -John le Carre
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
Quote by -John le Carre
In the '60s - and right up to the present day - the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a state secret. To divulge it is a crime. The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them.
Quote by -John le Carre
When I was 16 or 17, anyone could have had me if they sang the right song and recruited me in the right way. Which is why I've always had a sneaking understanding for people who took the wrong route. That doesn't mean to say I took it or even contemplated it myself.
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It is my writing dilemma. 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.
Quote by -John le Carre
When you are brought up as a frozen child, you go on freezing. It wasn't until I had my four sons, who have brought me immense joy, that I began to thaw. That I realised how utterly extraordinary my childhood was.
Quote by -John le Carre
I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.
Quote by -John le Carre
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
Quote by -John le Carre
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
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Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.
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I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name.
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I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.
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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.
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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.
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Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.
Quote by -John le Carre
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.
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I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
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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.
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By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.
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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.
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America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.
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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.
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