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" 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. "

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" 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. "

John le Carre

Sense

Live

Good

" 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. "

John le Carre

Live

Struggle

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

" 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. "

" 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 want to be like Ford Madox Ford. I want to be talking to somebody across a fire, and I want him to join me and listen to me, and if he is fidgeting in his chair, I know I am not doing my job. I am a storyteller, and I know most people like a story. "

" 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, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even show passes to go in and out of the building. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

John le Carre

Through

Outside

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. 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 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 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. "