John Le
John Le
book men hands
I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
loyalty liars gentleman
Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.
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Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time.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.