Quotes 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.

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.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

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

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

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

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.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

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

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

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.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've always had difficulties with female characters.

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.

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.

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.