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" 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. "

John le Carre

Good

Writing

World

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

" 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

" To give the best of the day to your work is most important. "

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

" 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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" You should have died when I killed you. "

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

John le Carre

Little

Book

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

" 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. "

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

John le Carre

Through

Outside

" It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret. "

" Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage. "

" 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

" I write and walk and swim and drink. "

" Writers are two-home men - they want a place outside and a place within. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "