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John Le Carre Quotes


A committee is an animal with four back legs.

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

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

America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.

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

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

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

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

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

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

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

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 am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.

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

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

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.

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.

I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.