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"Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic."
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"Villainessa Tittel was a hired killer, an assassin by trade. She had enjoyed the best education and had been trained by assassins who had (until then at least) been considered the best in the business. She had turned to 'cleaning' as an occupation because she really enjoyed endings more than beginnings " and anyway, she didn't need to know her mark's entire pedigree or life's story, or to have some kind of facetious moral justification just to collect her fee. Unsurprisingly, when she did read " on those rare occasions " her books were always dog-eared from the back."
"Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction."
"I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying."
"Ripley is married. And he's not lost. He has his feet on the ground."
"But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended."
"In camp was found a book, the first of the kind I had ever seen, in which I was made a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundreds."
Explore more quotes by John Le Carre
"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."
"In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know."
"During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity."
"The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received."
"When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt."
"We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own."
"A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it."
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