John le Carre Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von John le Carre:

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.

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

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.

John le Carre

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

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

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.

John le Carre

It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.

John le Carre

In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even show passes to go in and out of the building.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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

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.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

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

We lie to one another every day, in the sweetest way, often unconsciously. We dress ourselves and compose ourselves in order to present ourselves to one another.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

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

I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.

John le Carre

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

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

John le Carre

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.

John le Carre

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.

John le Carre

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

John le Carre

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

John le Carre

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