JOHN LE CARRÉ QUOTES IV

British author (1931- )

Everyone who is not happy must be shot.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

The Little Drummer Girl


Peace, gentlemen, it is well known, does not come of its own accord, and neither does freedom. Peace has enemies. Peace must be won by the sword.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

The Mission Song

Tags: peace


America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

"The United States of America Has Gone Mad", 2003

Tags: America


It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

Smiley's People

Tags: death


For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

interview, The Paris Review, summer 1997

Tags: war


I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

interview, The Paris Review, summer 1997


I use the furniture of espionage to amuse the reader, to make the reader listen to me, because 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. I think what gives my works whatever universality they have is that they use the metaphysical secret world to describe some realities of the overt world.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

attributed, "Master of the Secret World: John le Carré on Deception, Storytelling and American Hubris", Salon, October 21, 1996


The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

The Guardian, April 12, 2013


The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

attributed, The Creative Compass: Writing Your Way from Inspiration to Publication


Why did I desert Labour? Total bloody disillusionment. The party was a corpse. It had no ideology, it became detached, old, spineless and needed to go.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

interview, The Telegraph, August 31, 2010


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 CARRÉ

interview, The Telegraph, August 31, 2010

Tags: books