British author (1931- )
Peace, gentlemen, it is well known, does not come of its own accord, and neither does freedom. Peace has enemies. Peace must be won by the sword.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
The Mission Song
Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
The Little Drummer Girl
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
attributed, The Creative Compass: Writing Your Way from Inspiration to Publication
It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Smiley's People
America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
"The United States of America Has Gone Mad", 2003
I use the furniture of espionage to amuse the reader, to make the reader listen to me, because 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. I think what gives my works whatever universality they have is that they use the metaphysical secret world to describe some realities of the overt world.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
attributed, "Master of the Secret World: John le Carré on Deception, Storytelling and American Hubris", Salon, October 21, 1996
The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
The Guardian, April 12, 2013
I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
interview, The Paris Review, summer 1997
Why did I desert Labour? Total bloody disillusionment. The party was a corpse. It had no ideology, it became detached, old, spineless and needed to go.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
interview, The Telegraph, August 31, 2010
For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
interview, The Paris Review, summer 1997
Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
interview, The Telegraph, August 31, 2010