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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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