Quotes By John Le Carre

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.