
Quoted in Time magazine, October 31, 1977. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,945814,00.html
Also attributed to Christopher Hampton by the Sunday Times Magazine (16 October 1977)
"The Secret Miracle"; Variant: Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
Source: Ficciones (1944)
Quoted in Time magazine, October 31, 1977. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,945814,00.html
Also attributed to Christopher Hampton by the Sunday Times Magazine (16 October 1977)
Sunday Times Magazine (London, October 16, 1977)
Nonconformity (1953/1996)
Context: The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources. The shortcut to comfort is called “specialization,” and in an eye-ear-nose-and-throat doctor this makes sense. But in a writer it is fatal. The less he sees of other writers the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York.
As quoted in "Master of the Secret World: John le Carré on Deception, Storytelling and American Hubris" by Andrew Ross, in Salon (21 October 1996); also in Conversations with John le Carré (2004) edited by Matthew Joseph Bruccoli and Judith Baughman, p. 140
“A writer writes what he knows, in ways that are natural to him.”
Source: Shifu: You'll Do Anything for a Laugh and Other Stories
“As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.”
"A needle for your pornograph" (22 July 1971), p. 67
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
“A man is free in proportion to the measure of his virtues, and the extent to which he is free determines what his virtues can accomplish.”
Et pro virtutum habitu quilibet et liber est, et, quatenus est liber, eatenus virtutibus pollet.
Bk. 7, ch. 25
Policraticus (1159)
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School
“A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.”
Quoted by Bennett Cerf in Shake Well Before Using http://books.google.com/books?id=gVZAAAAAIAAJ&q=%22What+no+wife+of+a+writer+can+ever+understand+no+matter+if+she+lives+with+him+for+twenty+years+is+that+a+writer+is+working+when+he%27s+staring+out+the+window%22&pg=PA118#v=onepage (1948)