John le Carre Writing Quotations

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.

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.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.

Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.

I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck.

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.

Most of us live in a condition of secrecy: secret desires, secret appetites, secret hatreds and relationship with the institutions which is extremely intense and uncomfortable. These are, to me, a part of the ordinary human condition. So I don't think I'm writing about abnormal things. ... Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

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

A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.