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"A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it."
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"A misadventure is an act that has a safer, less self-detrimental, less interesting alternative. But you choose that act because you want to do something memorable and worthy of discussion."

"Life is a book. Read it. But do not forget to write yours."

"At least I can say I once worked a day on a tea plantation in Far North Queensland."

"Beyond these moments, she could hardly count the fumbling ministrations of boys in high school who, even to her senior prom, never went beyond sticky pleasantries. With one exception, it was just a sort of half-clothed handshake for bragging rights, none hers."

"To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common."

"We live that we might have experience; that through it we might gain wisdom, compassion, faith, and inner strength."

"Failure is only an experience. Experience is the foundation of any success."

"Today's experience is necessary to equip you fully for the future."

"Experience comes from failure and success comes from experience. Today's pain will bring tomorrow's gain."

"But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy."
Explore more quotes by John Le Carre


"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."


"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."


"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."


"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."


"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."


"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."


"I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it."


"In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs."
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