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
spy
It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
lonely vanity people
It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
want
Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
divorce views funeral
Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.
thinking tension private-life
I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.
should-have literature should
You should have died when I killed you.
age stories belts
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.
struggle stories world
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.
lonely writing thinking
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, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.
war fighting differences
There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.
men wind loyal
Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishounorable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.
election jerk western
Elections are a Western jerk-off.
power-corrupts
All power corrupts but some must govern.
hypocrisy enemy odd
Those who are not with Mr. Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall -- just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.