Quotes By John Le Carre

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

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.

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

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.

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