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Every writer knows he is spurious every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
John le Carre
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John le Carre
Age: 89 †
Born: 1931
Born: October 19
Died: 2020
Died: December 12
Actor
Film Producer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Spy
Writer
Sweetwater
Texas
David John Moore Cornwell
David Cornwell
John le Carre
Authentic
Writer
Fiction
Rather
Every
Would
Spurious
Credible
More quotes by John le Carre
Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.
John le Carre
Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.
John le Carre
It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
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 old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.
John le Carre
Agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation tunnelers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip readers and disguise artists.
John le Carre
It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
John le Carre
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
John le Carre
But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
John le Carre
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 perhaps with our marriage.
John le Carre
I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
John le Carre
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
John le Carre
Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
John le Carre
I mean, you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
John le Carre
I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.
John le Carre
Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
John le Carre
