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John le Carre [1931-0] English

Rank: 102
Writer, Author

David John Moore Cornwell, alias John le Carré /lə ˈkɑːrˌeɪ/, is a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, he worked for the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service, and began writing novels under his pen name.

Intelligence, Relationship, Age, Imagination, Marriage, Communication, Experience, Family, Famous, History, Hope, Politics, Time

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.	Age, Intelligence, Time	101
A committee is an animal with four back legs.		102
Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.		103
The creation of George Smiley, the retired spy recalled to hunt for just such a high-ranking mole in 'Tinker, Tailor,' was extremely personal. I borrowed elements of people I admired and invested them in this mythical character. I'm such a fluent, specious person now, but I was an extremely awkward fellow in those days.		104
I suffer from the same frustration that every decent American suffers from. That is, that you begin to wonder whether decent liberal instincts, decent humanitarian instincts, can actually penetrate the right-wing voice, get through the steering of American opinion by the mass media.		105
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.		106
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.	History	107
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.		108
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.	Experience, Family	109
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.		110
Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.		111
It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.	Intelligence	112
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.		113
Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.		114
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.	Age	115
I made an awful mess of my first marriage. It was hard to live with me being me. I was so abnormal. I mean, most writers struggle. I hadn't struggled. I couldn't suddenly go down to the PEN Club and behave like a normal human being, because most of those guys were struggling to make a couple of thousand pounds a year.	Marriage	116
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.	Hope, Marriage, Relationship	117
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.		118
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.		119
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.		120
My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.		121
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.	Imagination	122
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.		123
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.		124
A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.		125
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.		126
I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.		201
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.		202
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.	Relationship	203
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.		204
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.	Communication	205
Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. 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.	Imagination	206
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.	Politics	207
The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.		208
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.		209
For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.		210
America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.		211
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.	Relationship	212
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.	Intelligence	213
I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies.		214
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.		215
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.		216
I've always had difficulties with female characters.		217
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.		218
By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.		219
I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.		220
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.		221
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.		222
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.		223
You should have died when I killed you.		224
I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.		225
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.		226
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.		301
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.		302
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.		303
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.		304
Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.		305
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.		306
Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.		307
I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.		308
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.		309
I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.		310
Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.		311
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.		312
Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.		313
But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.		314
The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.	Intelligence	315
I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.		316
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.		317
To give the best of the day to your work is most important.		318
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.		319
I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.		320
I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.		321
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.		322
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.		323
Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West.		324
Writers are two-home men - they want a place outside and a place within.		325
I write and walk and swim and drink.		326
I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.	Famous	401
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.		402
'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.		403
The merit of 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,' then - or its offence, depending where you stood - was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible.		404
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.	Intelligence	405
I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.	Intelligence	406
I want to be like Ford Madox Ford. I want to be talking to somebody across a fire, and I want him to join me and listen to me, and if he is fidgeting in his chair, I know I am not doing my job. I am a storyteller, and I know most people like a story.		407
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.		408
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.		409

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