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
absolutely arm best brings collection essential government healthy intelligence left necessary needs simply strong understand work
It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.
enough-said want arms
We've had enough." He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. "We've had a bellyful, in fact." "And like everyone who's had enough," said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, "he wants more.
war army technology
It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day.
brought came disgust imagination spy work
'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.
held impunity
Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West.
despite man secretly terrible
I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.
available certainly good manage writers
Well, certainly 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.
confronted famous literary occupied territory
I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.
abroad budget cia executive intelligence known percentage powers secret tiny
SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.
coming creative dressing energy equipped imagination novelists relying scene
Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. 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.
books grab high name reader sit
If I had to put a name to it, I would wish that all my books were entertainments. I think the first thing you've got to do is grab the reader by the ear, and make him sit down and listen. Make him laugh, make him feel. We all want to be entertained at a very high level.
men writers
Writers are two-home men - they want a place outside and a place within.
war literature shade
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
movie book reading
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.