John le Carre Quotes

Writing a book is like torture that you don't know, but after it's done and there it is. It's a joy like unlike anything else, I think it's the closest that a man can come to knowing what is feels like to have a baby.

In 2004, I took a one year sabbatical to finish my second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. At the end of that year, I was not done with my book, and had to in effect resign from work. I did. I never went back.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

For an author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written.

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

Every book is a kind of struggle, and it's a miracle when it comes out.

Finishing books - and leaving the world you've created - is always a kind of emotionally wrenching experience. I usually cry.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

I was going to write a book one day and I actually did. To have it is a major accomplishment for me.

Like all former thinkers, I'm writing a book.

I have taken as much as six years to prepare a book for writing. There is such a delirium of effort in the production of a book; it's like childbirth. And, like childbirth, one forgets the pains immediately so that when you come to write another one you dare to take it up again. Some precious anesthesia sees you through.

If you don't like my book, write your own.

I do not read the works of Salman Rushdie, I write them. By the time I have finished writing them all I can think of is never reading them again. It's so deep, your involvement with a book, that once it's finished, then you are really done with it.

I write books that way - I put a first line down and say, "Where does this go?"

It may take a village to raise a baby, but hell! it takes an army to produce a book.

It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me - that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.

Following takes why. Transactions take what. It has to be real. It has to be the same for writing a book.

Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.

The process of book writing for me is entirely one of trial and error.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.