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" The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead. "
John le Carre
Over
Cold War
Dead
Related Quotes:
" For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict. "
John le Carre
Political
Better
Conflict
" 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. "
John le Carre
Say
Yourself
Laugh
" 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
" I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with. "
John le Carre
Get
Think
Whatever
" 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. "
John le Carre
Intelligence
Service
Budget
" 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. "
John le Carre
Better
Age
Go For It
" 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
Up
Present
" 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. "
John le Carre
World
Communication
Man
" I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making. "
John le Carre
Message
Mean
Business
" I write and walk and swim and drink. "
John le Carre
Drink
I Write
Walk
" 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
" 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. "
John le Carre
Relationship
Hope
Live
" I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety. "
John le Carre
Had
Shade
Nothing
" 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
" 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
Without
Good
" 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. "
John le Carre
Think
You
Relationship
" Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby. "
John le Carre
Like
Little
Book
" Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news. "
John le Carre
Relationship
Truth
Performance
" 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
Struggle
Good
Same
" 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
" 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 am still making order out of chaos by reinvention. "
John le Carre
Chaos
I Am
Out
" 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. "
John le Carre
Character
Person
People
" 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. "
John le Carre
Good
People
You
" I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man. "
John le Carre
Library
Book
Second-Hand
" Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic. "
John le Carre
Fiction
Than
Rather
" I've always had difficulties with female characters. "
John le Carre
Characters
Difficulties
Had
" 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
Me
" 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. "
John le Carre
Media
American
Frustration
" 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. "
John le Carre
Service
You
Writing