Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Live today, for tomorrow we die.
I don't inflict horrors on readers.
I invented the historical spy novel.
I'm not really a mass market writer.
I've always liked lost, old New York.
The best Paris I know now is in my head.
I read very little contemporary anything.
I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.
If you're a writer, you're always working.
If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.
One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it.
You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.
I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.
I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.
When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.
Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.
I love the combination of the words 'spies' and 'Balkans.' It's like meat and potatoes.
I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.
Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.
Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.
Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying
I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.
Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?
Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.
I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.
I love the gray areas, but I like the gray areas as considered by bright, educated, courageous people.
I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.
My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.
I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.
I don't work Sunday any more... The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death.
I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.
Women take great care of themselves in France. It's a culture dedicated to making women beautiful and to manners.
Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.
Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.
I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.
I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.
I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.
The brutalization of humans by other humans never fails to get to me in some angry-making way. It shot up in me like an explosion.
I read very little contemporary anything... I don't think I read what other people read, but then why would I, considering what I do?
I like to say I sit alone in my room, and I fight the language. I am wildly obsessive. I can't let something go if I think it's wrong.
Fast-paced from start to finish, 'The Honourable Schoolboy' is fired by le Carre's conviction regarding evil done and its consequences.
For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.