A biography for John le Carrehasn’t been written yet.
“Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.”
“I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.”
“I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.”
“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.”
“'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.”
“But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.”
“You should have died when I killed you.”
“In every war zone that I've 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.”
“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.”
“My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.”
“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”
“Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.”
“I do believe very much in movie as a one-man-show. I think that where I've watched movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.”
“There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.”
“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 think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.”