English - Writer | October 19, 1931 -
I've always had difficulties with female characters.
John le Carre
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I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.
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You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.
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But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
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I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.
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Well, certainly I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.
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When you are brought up as a frozen child, you go on freezing. It wasn't until I had my four sons, who have brought me immense joy, that I began to thaw. That I realised how utterly extraordinary my childhood was.
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I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name.
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SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.
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I suffer from the same frustration that every decent American suffers from. That is, that you begin to wonder whether decent liberal instincts, decent humanitarian instincts, can actually penetrate the right-wing voice, get through the steering of American opinion by the mass media.
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I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.
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America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.
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