Quotes by John le Carre

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

In every war zone that Ive 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.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

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.

I dont 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.

If youre 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.

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.

The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St Jamess Park Tube station in London.

Its part of a writers profession, as its part of a spys profession, to prey on the community to which hes attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether its his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.

Its necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. Its 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. Its the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.

I wrote The Spy Who Came in from the Cold at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.

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

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.

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

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.

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

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.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: theyre casting, theyre dressing the scene, theyre working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and theyre also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

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: theyre casting, theyre dressing the scene, theyre working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and theyre also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.