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.”

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

“If I had to put a name to it, I would wish that all my books were entertainments. I think the first thing you've got to do is grab the reader by the ear, and make him sit down and listen. Make him laugh, make him feel. We all want to be entertained at a very high level.”

“When you are brought up as a frozen child, you go on freezing. It wasn't until I had my four sons, who have brought me immense joy, that I began to thaw. That I realised how utterly extraordinary my childhood was.”

“I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.”

“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.”

“I write and walk and swim and drink.”

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

“To give the best of the day to your work is most important.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.”

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

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

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

“I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.”

“If you're 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.”