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" 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. "

John le Carre

Her

Confidence

She

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

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

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

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

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

John le Carre

Little

Book

" It is my writing dilemma. 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. "

" I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety. "

" 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. "

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

" I've always had difficulties with female characters. "

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

" In the '60s - and right up to the present day - the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a state secret. To divulge it is a crime. The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them. "

John le Carre

Name

Present

" 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. "

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

" I write and walk and swim and drink. "

" I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it. "

John le Carre

Think

Wrong

" I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" You should have died when I killed you. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

John le Carre

You

Family

" 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. "

" I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies. "