I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.
Author
John le Carre
27 quotations
About John le Carre
David John Moore Cornwell, known by his pen name John le Carré, was an English author. Many of his espionage novels have been adapted for film or television. He has been described as a "sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer", and is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Near the end of his life, le Carré became an Irish citizen.
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by John le CarreIn every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex tha…
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even…
My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.
But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.
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Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and pe…
Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even…
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and pe…
The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.
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 intell…
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…
Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and pe…
History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody need…
I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.
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 …
I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and o…
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.
I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.