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
writing mountain impossible
There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
writing hands literature
I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
mistake book writing
Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.
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.
strong book writing
I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.
writing thinking hands
Without a pen in my hand I can't think.
writing principles stories
It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.
writing spy desperate
I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck.
writing work-out imagination
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.
writing two pages
When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.
writing dust pie
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
real writing thinking
Most of us live in a condition of secrecy: secret desires, secret appetites, secret hatreds and relationship with the institutions which is extremely intense and uncomfortable. These are, to me, a part of the ordinary human condition. So I don't think I'm writing about abnormal things. ... Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.
writing cat stories
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.
cat writing watches
A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.