Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity. "
John le Carre
Us
Think
Religions
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
John le Carre
People
Fire
I Am
" 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. "
John le Carre
Imagination
Opinion
Energy
" 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. "
John le Carre
You
Feel
Wish
" Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it. "
John le Carre
Something
Know
Should
" A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world. "
John le Carre
View
Place
Dangerous
" 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. "
John le Carre
Early
Fly
Language
" There was an ITV television production of the second novel I wrote, called 'Murder of Quality.' It was a little murder story set in a public school - I'd once taught at Eton, and I used that stuff. "
John le Carre
Story
Used
Quality
" I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man. "
John le Carre
Library
Book
Second-Hand
" 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. "
John le Carre
Know
Crisis
Reality
" Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie. "
John le Carre
Writing
Mud
Pie
" You should have died when I killed you. "
John le Carre
You
Should
Died
" But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state. "
John le Carre
Working
State
Difference
" For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict. "
John le Carre
Political
Better
Conflict
" I've always had difficulties with female characters. "
John le Carre
Characters
Difficulties
Had
" I happen to write by hand. I don't even type. "
John le Carre
Type
Hand
Even
" 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. "
John le Carre
People
Building
Circus
" 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. "
John le Carre
Hell
Last
Limit
" 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. "
John le Carre
Will
People
Always
" I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services. "
John le Carre
Sixties
War
Great
" 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. "
John le Carre
Experience
Family
Work
" When you are brought up as a frozen child, you go on freezing. It wasn't until I had my four sons, who have brought me immense joy, that I began to thaw. That I realised how utterly extraordinary my childhood was. "
John le Carre
Joy
Child
You
" 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. "
John le Carre
Intelligence
Community
Think
" 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. "
John le Carre
Think
Know
Childhood
" 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. "
John le Carre
Experience
Childhood
Parents
" Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love. "
John le Carre
Love Is
Betrayal
Happen
" 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
Me
Family
" Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. "
John le Carre
Your
Book
Movie
" Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West. "
John le Carre
Totalitarian
Accountable
West
" 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. "
John le Carre
World
Control
Growing Up
" Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book. "
John le Carre
Talk
Mistakes
Book