Quotes from John le Carre

[My novels] introduce levels of intelligence ... moral doubt [and] self-doubt, which may not pertain [to real-world espionage].

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.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.

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

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.

I've always had difficulties with female characters.

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

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.

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.

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.

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.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

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.

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.

You should have died when I killed you.

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.

Life was to be a search, or nothing! But it was the fear that it was nothing that drove me forward. Every encounter was an encounter with myself.

What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?

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.

What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing rights and wrongs?

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.

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