Quotes By John Le Carre

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

You should have died when I killed you.

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.

For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.

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

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.

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

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.

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.

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.

Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

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

Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.

I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.

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

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

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.

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.

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