John le Carré - Writer Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

View all John le Carré Quotes
For the last few years I have lived only in the deep country. I've always kept away from writers and the literary set. I'd much rather talk to the woodcutter than a fellow writer. I like the primary material. I don't like exchanging ideas much. I don't like talking about my work, believe it or not. I'm a total bore, actually.

John le Carré
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.

John le Carré
I realised that now and forever more I was to be branded as the spy turned writer, rather than as a writer who, like scores of his kind, had done a stint in the secret world, and written about it.

John le Carré
I was receiving the sort of attention writers dream of. My only problem was, I didn't believe my own publicity.

John le Carré
I think I was born with two — for a writer — lucky skills. One is a very good ear for voice and also a very retentive ear, so that I can recall both accent and words for a long time afterwards. And the other is a wary retention of certain detail-topography, rooms, furniture and so on.

John le Carré
I would give to a composite writer all the virtues I have not got, but the trouble is, I am not sure he would be able to write. I would give him clarity of vision, independence of public acclaim, the early experience of happy heterosexual love between two good parents, and a voracious appetite for other people's writing. Then I would fall asleep.

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

John le Carré
Graham Greene once referred to a chip of ice that has to be in the writer's heart. And that is the strain: that you must abstain from relationships and yet at the same time engage in them. There you have, I think, the real metaphysical relationship between the writer and the spy.

John le Carré
Every writer wants to be believed. But every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

John le Carré