Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
John le Carre
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Present
Future
Thought
More quotes by John le Carre
Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.
John le Carre
I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.
John le Carre
I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
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
I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no-one else can make them.
John le Carre
But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
John le Carre
I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
John le Carre
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
John le Carre
The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy.
John le Carre
It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
John le Carre
Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.
John le Carre
I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.
John le Carre
A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.
John le Carre
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
John le Carre
There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
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
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
Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
John le Carre
