John le Carre
John le Carre
David John Moore Cornwellis a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, he worked for the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service, and began writing novels under a pen name. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became an international best-seller, and remains one of his best-known works. Following the success of this novel, he left MI6 to become a full-time author...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth19 October 1931
quiet
He has the gift of quiet.
chaotic growing instinct lead performer strength weakness
If you're growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended back.
intelligence since
I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.
coming creative dressing energy equipped imagination novelists relying scene
Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. 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.
confronted famous literary occupied territory
I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.
brought came disgust imagination spy work
'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.
capacity perpetuate remain spin states terrified united
I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies.
british choose leak member name pleases quite secret services state
In the '60s - and right up to the present day - the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a state secret. To divulge it is a crime. The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them.
should-have eight solitude
It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three.
unhappy-childhood people literature
People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.
dozen doing-nothing reason
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
who-we-are
Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are.
spy literature population
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
war literature shade
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.