John le Carre

“I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.”

“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.”

“A committee is an animal with four back legs.”

“When I was 16 or 17, anyone could have had me if they sang the right song and recruited me in the right way. Which is why I've always had a sneaking understanding for people who took the wrong route. That doesn't mean to say I took it or even contemplated it myself.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies.”

“I've always had difficulties with female characters.”

“More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.”

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

“Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.”

“I made an awful mess of my first marriage. It was hard to live with me being me. I was so abnormal. I mean, most writers struggle. I hadn't struggled. I couldn't suddenly go down to the PEN Club and behave like a normal human being, because most of those guys were struggling to make a couple of thousand pounds a year.”

“I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.”

“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.”

“But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.”

“Writers are two-home men - they want a place outside and a place within.”