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"If I had to put a name to it, I would wish that all my books were entertainments. I think the first thing you've got to do is grab the reader by the ear, and make him sit down and listen. Make him laugh, make him feel. We all want to be entertained at a very high level."
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"A bad book with a good cover is nothing but a wooden house with a golden door."
"I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind."
"The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it."
"Some books mirror reality while others are entirely fantasy. My favorite are those that manage to weave both into a world."
"Even a book with completely empty pages will change you because you will start thinking about the reason behind this emptiness and once you enter the thinking territory it means that you entered a territory of change!"
"It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks."
"They want a lip print for their autograph books. I'm a sport; I go along."
"The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me."
"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."
Explore more quotes by John Le Carre
"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."
"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."
"I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it."
"I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price."
"I think I'm in the same mood as ever, but in some ways more mature. I guess you could say that, at 65, when you've seen the world shape up as I have, there are only two things you can do: laugh or kill yourself."
"I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no one else can make them."
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