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All Quotes by author - John le Carre

" A committee is an animal with four back legs. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention. "

" I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name. "

" 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 don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" If you're growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended back. "

" 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. "

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

" I made an awful mess of my first marriage. It was hard to live with me being me. I was so abnormal. I mean, most writers struggle. I hadn't struggled. I couldn't suddenly go down to the PEN Club and behave like a normal human being, because most of those guys were struggling to make a couple of thousand pounds a year. "

" 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. "

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

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