Quotes 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.

The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

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.

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

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

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.

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.

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.

I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.

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.

To give the best of the day to your work is most important.

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.

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

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

Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.

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.

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.

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.

I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.

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.

Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West.

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.

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 mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.