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" 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. "

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" 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

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

John le Carre

Through

Outside

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

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

" I suffer from the same frustration that every decent American suffers from. That is, that you begin to wonder whether decent liberal instincts, decent humanitarian instincts, can actually penetrate the right-wing voice, get through the steering of American opinion by the mass media. "

" The creation of George Smiley, the retired spy recalled to hunt for just such a high-ranking mole in 'Tinker, Tailor,' was extremely personal. I borrowed elements of people I admired and invested them in this mythical character. I'm such a fluent, specious person now, but I was an extremely awkward fellow in those days. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

John le Carre

Believe

Think

" Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

John le Carre

End

Never

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

John le Carre

Think

Religions

" 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 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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" When I was 16 or 17, anyone could have had me if they sang the right song and recruited me in the right way. Which is why I've always had a sneaking understanding for people who took the wrong route. That doesn't mean to say I took it or even contemplated it myself. "

John le Carre

Understanding

People

" SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel. "

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

" 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. "