Quotes from John le Carre

He has the gift of quiet.

I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.

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.

It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.

Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.

The pharmaceutical corporations are engaged in the systematic corruption of the medical profession, country by country

A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.

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.

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.

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.

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

The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.

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.

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.

Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.

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.

The merit of 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,' then - or its offence, depending where you stood - was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible.

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.

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

Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three.

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

When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.

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.