John Le
John Le
dangerous desk watch
A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world
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.
believe watched
I do believe very much in movie as a one-man-show. I think that where I've watched movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.
came spy
The spy who came in from the cold.
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.