"I happen to write by hand. I don't even type"
About this Quote
Le Carre’s little shrug of a declaration is also a quiet flex: an espionage novelist refusing the tools of speed in a genre obsessed with systems, signals, and the frictionless flow of information. “I happen to” sounds casual, almost accidental, but the choice is pointed. Writing by hand isn’t just nostalgia; it’s an ethic. It implies slowness, deliberation, and a willingness to let language resist you a little - the opposite of the bureaucratic throughput he spent a career anatomizing.
The line also performs a kind of character work, the way his best spies do. Le Carre built worlds where technology rarely saves you from moral compromise; it just accelerates the paperwork around it. By insisting on pen and paper, he positions himself as the human sensor in the room, gathering the faint signals that computers flatten: hesitation, ambivalence, a sentence that needs to be rewritten because it’s too clean to be true. You can hear the suspicion of convenience. Typing is fast; fast can be glib. Handwriting forces you to live inside the sentence long enough to feel its weak joints.
Context matters, too. Late-20th-century literary culture increasingly framed authors as content producers with deadlines and platforms. Le Carre’s refusal reads as anti-industrial: a craftsman guarding the conditions that make his particular kind of realism possible. It’s not anti-technology so much as anti-frictionlessness - a reminder that in his universe, and maybe in ours, the most consequential work is done where the process leaves a trace.
The line also performs a kind of character work, the way his best spies do. Le Carre built worlds where technology rarely saves you from moral compromise; it just accelerates the paperwork around it. By insisting on pen and paper, he positions himself as the human sensor in the room, gathering the faint signals that computers flatten: hesitation, ambivalence, a sentence that needs to be rewritten because it’s too clean to be true. You can hear the suspicion of convenience. Typing is fast; fast can be glib. Handwriting forces you to live inside the sentence long enough to feel its weak joints.
Context matters, too. Late-20th-century literary culture increasingly framed authors as content producers with deadlines and platforms. Le Carre’s refusal reads as anti-industrial: a craftsman guarding the conditions that make his particular kind of realism possible. It’s not anti-technology so much as anti-frictionlessness - a reminder that in his universe, and maybe in ours, the most consequential work is done where the process leaves a trace.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by John
Add to List
