John Le
John Le
character female difficulty
I've always had difficulties with female characters.
thinking two laughing
I think I'm in the same mood as ever, but in some ways more mature. I guess you could say that, at 65, when you've seen the world shape up as I have, there are only two things you can do: laugh or kill yourself.
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.