Quote

When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly it's just the beginning.

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
Two
Surprising
Wells
Twenty
Well
Twenties
Writing
Fast
Going
Pages
Chapter
Really
Beginning
Terribly
Goes
Chapters
Write
Badly

More quotes by John le Carre

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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.
John le Carre
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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
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Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
John le Carre
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Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time.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
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People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem.
John le Carre
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All power corrupts but some must govern.
John le Carre
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When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
John le Carre
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What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
John le Carre
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If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
John le Carre
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It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
John le Carre
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As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
John le Carre
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Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.
John le Carre
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We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
John le Carre
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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 perhaps with our marriage.
John le Carre
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More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
John le Carre
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
John le Carre
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Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
John le Carre
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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
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The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
John le Carre
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In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.
John le Carre