John le Carre
John le Carre
David John Moore Cornwellis a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, he worked for the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service, and began writing novels under a pen name. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became an international best-seller, and remains one of his best-known works. Following the success of this novel, he left MI6 to become a full-time author...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth19 October 1931
believe men ordinary
There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.
truth power thinking
I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.
spy world couches
For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.
cowboy thinking play
What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.
luck here-and-there forget
It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
ignorance experts world
When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.
thinking bankers get-away
I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
writing hands literature
I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
mean love-means betray
Love means having something to betray.
names done dare
The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God,
mistake book writing
Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.
dirty mean boys
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.
fiction subjects
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
political conflict description
For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.