Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by John Le Carre, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring John Le Carre quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 336 John Le Carre quotes for you to read and share.
What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries? -- John Le Carre
That one won't crack, though, Mendel decided with approval; one of your flabby oak trees, Smiley was. Think you could blow him over with one puff, but when it comes to the storm he's the only one left standing at the end of it. -- John Le Carre
I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety. -- John Le Carre
What that judge did is immoral. Here in Panama when we bribe somebody we expect loyalty. -- John Le Carre
You can't eat politics, you can't sell them, and you can't sleep with them,' Drake liked to say. So you might as well make money out of them. -- John Le Carre
Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence. -- John Le Carre
It was him taught Idi Amin's lads how to extract voluntary confessions with the aid of an electric cattle-prod. Our chum likes them English and he likes them with a dirty past. He -- John Le Carre
He was witnessing an insane relay race in which each contestant ran faster and longer than the last, arriving nowhere but his own destruction -- John Le Carre
On one hand we go like hell for every terror cell we can find, we penetrate it, we destroy it. On the other hand, there is a much bigger need for a political solution. -- John Le Carre
Think I'll just buff up the silver,' he announced, loud enough for her to hear and do something about him if she wanted. -- John Le Carre
If a decade of diplomatic life had taught Toby one thing, it was to treat every crisis as normal and soluble. -- John Le Carre
Never confess, my friend," he advised drowsily, clasping Melik's hand. "If you confess, they will keep you there forever. -- John Le Carre
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. -- John Le Carre
And what's life if it isn't invention? Starting with inventing yourself. -- John Le Carre
Haydon was more than his model, he was his inspiration, the torch-bearer of a certain kind of English calling which - for the very reason that it was vague and understated and elusive - had made sense of Guillam's life till now. -- John Le Carre
Waking and sleeping she had demanded to know where she belonged in a white man's world, and how and where she should invest her ambition and her humanity -- John Le Carre
It is said that men condemned to death are subject to sudden moments of elation; as if, like moths in the fire, their destruction were coincidental with attainment. -- John Le Carre
Page 112 The Honorable Schoolboy
He was attended this morning by his wife, a former Bible School teacher from Borneo, a dried- out shrew in bobbed hair and ankle socks who could spot a sin before it was committed. -- John Le Carre
History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. -- John Le Carre
When I was 16 or 17, anyone could have had me if they sang the right song and recruited me in the right way. Which is why I've always had a sneaking understanding for people who took the wrong route. That doesn't mean to say I took it or even contemplated it myself. -- John Le Carre
A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger. -- John Le Carre
George, this is history," Lacon protested weakly. "This is not today. -- John Le Carre
Cyril, church warden and lead tenor in the choir, lives with mother, banned from unsupervised contact with schoolchildren; Harold, drunk dentist, early retirement, pretty thatched cottage off the Bodmin road, one son in rehab, wife in the bin. -- John Le Carre
They would expect him to be afraid; for his service pursued traitors as the eye of God followed Cain across the desert. -- John Le Carre
To give the best of the day to your work is most important. -- John Le Carre
I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly. -- John Le Carre
Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism ... when had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom? -- John Le Carre
Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history. -- John Le Carre
You're history, Donohue. You think countries run the fucking world! Go back to fucking Sunday school. It's 'God save our multinational' they're singing these days. -- John Le Carre
He has a saying: he'll only believe what can be written on a postcard. -- John Le Carre
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. -- John Le Carre
His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were. -- John Le Carre
A man who lives apart, not to others but alone, is exposed to obvious psychological dangers. In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire. -- John Le Carre
He's going to save the world before he leaves it if it kills him. -- John Le Carre
A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul. -- John Le Carre
More cruelly: he feared her faith because, as a fully paid-up pessimist, he knew he had none. -- John Le Carre
For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics. -- John Le Carre
I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering. -- John Le Carre
Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen. -- John Le Carre
Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are. -- John Le Carre
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature. -- John Le Carre
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. -- John Le Carre
Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were volcanoes. -- John Le Carre
But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy. -- John Le Carre
Those who are not with Mr. Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall
just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy. -- John Le Carre
Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news. -- John Le Carre
Promise to build a chap a house, he won't believe you. Threaten to burn his place down, he'll do what you tell him. Fact of life. -- John Le Carre
I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck. -- John Le Carre
Haydon had found his charm again. He could do that at the drop of a hat. He drew you and he repelled you. I remember that exactly. He danced all ways for you, playing your emotions against each other because he had none of his own. -- John Le Carre
Yes, dear Father. But has it ever occurred to you that by controlling [your feelings] you destroy them? How many times can we say sorry before we don't feel sorry anymore? -- John Le Carre
He had the nerve not to drink in a University where you proved your manhood by being drunk most of your first year. -- John Le Carre
Dresden: of all German cities, Smiley's favourite. He had loved its architecture, its odd jumble of medieval and classical buildings, sometimes reminiscent of Oxford, its cupolas, towers, and spires, its copper-green roofs shimmering under a hot sun. -- John Le Carre
Todd and Larry were Quinn's people. They were clean-limbed and pretty and, for a man of my age, ludicrously youthful. -- John Le Carre
He has his chin on his chest and his eyes down. He is thinking of his new baby, his new novel, tomorrow's dance contest. He is thinking of everything except what he is thinking about. -- John Le Carre
I suffer from the same frustration that every decent American suffers from. That is, that you begin to wonder whether decent liberal instincts, decent humanitarian instincts, can actually penetrate the right-wing voice, get through the steering of American opinion by the mass media. -- John Le Carre
When you are brought up as a frozen child, you go on freezing. It wasn't until I had my four sons, who have brought me immense joy, that I began to thaw. That I realised how utterly extraordinary my childhood was. -- John Le Carre
It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts. -- John Le Carre
My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak. -- John Le Carre
The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started. -- John Le Carre
We've had enough." He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. "We've had a bellyful, in fact."
"And like everyone who's had enough," said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, "he wants more. -- John Le Carre
He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man -- John Le Carre
Only adults had nervous breakdowns in those days, so the methods of survival for boys who refused to join the system were animal cunning, "internal immigration" as the Germans call it, or simply getting the hell out. I practised the first two, then opted for the third and took myself to Switzerland. -- John Le Carre
Smiley was the oddest. You thought, to look at him, that he couldn't cross the road alone, but you might as well have offered protection to a hedgehog. -- John Le Carre
I can't think of anybody worse to live with. -- John Le Carre
Dealing with beautiful women, Your Grace, Craw had warned, is like dealing with known criminals, and the lady you are about to solicit undoubtedly falls within that category. -- John Le Carre
Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant. -- John Le Carre
It is my writing dilemma. The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story. -- John Le Carre
The opposite of love isn't hate, it's apathy. -- John Le Carre
I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. - W. H. AUDEN -- John Le Carre
When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water. -- John Le Carre
Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do. -- John Le Carre
Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they're making a fantasy about themselves. -- John Le Carre
since nothing is more predictable than the media's parroting of its own fictions and the terror of each competitor that it will be scooped by the others, whether or not the story is true, because -- John Le Carre
I think that all writers feel alienated ... I know that I do ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated. -- John Le Carre
[My novels] introduce levels of intelligence ... moral doubt [and] self-doubt, which may not pertain [to real-world espionage]. -- John Le Carre
In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery ... -- John Le Carre
Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it. -- John Le Carre
There was only now [ ... ] There was no tomorrow because tomorrow was the excuse. There was now or there was nowhere. -- John Le Carre
Odd," he remarked finally. "One has no sense of shock. Why is that, Peter? You know me. Why is it? -- John Le Carre
he asked, in a more tentative tone, "What's the -- John Le Carre
The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on. -- John Le Carre
By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed. -- John Le Carre
You give the air of looking for someone, Sophie had said. But I think the missing person is yourself. Each -- John Le Carre
The snow is still falling and the worst man in the world is drawn towards it like a man who is contemplating his childhood in the dancing flakes. -- John Le Carre
What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs? -- John Le Carre
Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and though the wind appeared a little stronger, the snow was still swirling in all directions. -- John Le Carre
A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways. -- John Le Carre
He met failure as one day he would probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary. -- John Le Carre
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. -- John Le Carre
For Heaven's sake, Adrian, do you think Intelligence consists of unassailable philosophical truths? Does every priest have to prove that Christ was born on Christmas Day? -- John Le Carre
There was an ITV television production of the second novel I wrote, called 'Murder of Quality.' It was a little murder story set in a public school - I'd once taught at Eton, and I used that stuff. -- John Le Carre
All power corrupts but some must govern. -- John Le Carre
The pharmaceutical corporations are engaged in the systematic corruption of the medical profession, country by country -- John Le Carre
Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray. -- John Le Carre
Some problems - take Ireland - were insoluble, but you would never get the Americans to admit anything was insoluble. -- John Le Carre
You can't make war against terror. Terror is a technique of battle. It's a tactic that has been employed since time immemorial. You can conduct clandestine action against terrorists, and that must be done. -- John Le Carre
The crowd is bobbing round him and he is part of it, the free people of the earth have taken him among them. He is one with all these grown-up happy children celebrating their independence of things that never held them. -- John Le Carre
But despite such energetic mental exercise, the ghosts of time present would intrude and drive his dreams away. It was Ann who had robbed him of his peace, Ann who had once made the present so important and taught him the habit of reality, and when she went there was nothing. -- John Le Carre
The driver was holding open the rear door. He was young and blond, a boy in his prime. -- John Le Carre
There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't. -- John Le Carre
Everyone who is not happy must be shot. -- John Le Carre
I've always had difficulties with female characters. -- John Le Carre
But gossip must see its characters in black and white, equip them with sins and motives easily conveyed in the shorthand of conversation. -- John Le Carre
Every man has his personal devil waiting for him somewhere. -- John Le Carre
God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow. -- John Le Carre
They would know that inconsistency in human decision can make nonsense of the best-planned espionage approach; that cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a Departmental canteen. -- John Le Carre
Dieter had a theory that was pure Faust. Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective. He used to say that the greatest mistake man ever made was to distinguish between the mind and the body: an order does not exist if it is not obeyed. -- John Le Carre
The good pupils are often brilliant, and they keep you on your toes and take you to the limits of your knowledge. The worst pupils provide a unique insight into the criminal mind. -- John Le Carre
It was from us they learnt the secret of life: that we grow old without growing wise. They realized that nothing happened when we grew up: no blinding light on the road to Damascus, no sudden feeling of maturity. -- John Le Carre
I love you,' he repeated. 'All my failures were preparations for meeting you. -- John Le Carre
Hotel's full up, I'm afraid, Mr. Roper, Jonathan rehearsed in another last-ditch effort to fend off the inevitable. Herr Meister is desolated. A temporary clerk has made an unpardonable error. However, we have managed to obtain rooms for you at the Baur au Lac, et cetera. -- John Le Carre
Ashe was typical of that stratum of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat. -- John Le Carre
I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies. -- John Le Carre
These dons, so ponderous, so circuitous, , no sense of time. In a minute they'll be talking about the meaning of meaning. -- John Le Carre
Her instinct was to defend, to hoard the treasures of her life, to build about herself the symbols of normal existence. -- John Le Carre
There was a pause. Mendel said: 'It's the devil you don't know that gets you. -- John Le Carre
Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain. -- John Le Carre
The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing. -- John Le Carre
Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London. -- John Le Carre
It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop. -- John Le Carre
I want to be like Ford Madox Ford. I want to be talking to somebody across a fire, and I want him to join me and listen to me, and if he is fidgeting in his chair, I know I am not doing my job. I am a storyteller, and I know most people like a story. -- John Le Carre
Forgive me. Sometimes an answer can vary with a context, if you follow me -- John Le Carre
It is not fashionable to quote Stalin but he said once, half a million liquidated is a statistic, and one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy. -- John Le Carre
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes -- John Le Carre
Agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation tunnelers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip readers and disguise artists. -- John Le Carre
I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British. -- John Le Carre
A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world. -- John Le Carre
I move my lips when I read
I'm painfully slow
so I like really good English. -- John Le Carre
The Soviet Knight is dying inside his armour. He is a secondary power like you British. He can start a war but cannot continue one and cannot win one. Believe me. -- John Le Carre
I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now i wish i could distinguish them. -- John Le Carre
He became a solitary, belonging to that tragic class of active men prematurely deprived of activity; swimmers barred from the water or actors banished from the stage. -- John Le Carre
The ground on which you once stood is cut away. You have become a citizen of No Man's Land. I send you my greetings.
the closing lines of Smiley's letter to Karla persuading him to defect. -- John Le Carre
Austerity pleased her - it gave her the comfort of sacrifice. -- John Le Carre
Demos are mock battles, never the real thing. Everybody knows where they're going to happen, and when and why. Nobody gets seriously hurt. Well, not unless they ask for it. (ch. 4) -- John Le Carre
The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London. -- John Le Carre
SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel. -- John Le Carre
Band above her and calls to somebody she -- John Le Carre
There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation. -- John Le Carre
I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes. -- John Le Carre
I happen to write by hand. I don't even type. -- John Le Carre
In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even show passes to go in and out of the building. -- John Le Carre
Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch. -- John Le Carre
'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion. -- John Le Carre
Multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world's sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders. -- John Le Carre
Can't you see it's the same? The same guns, the same children dying in the streets? Only the dream has changed, the blood is the same colour. Is that what you want? -- John Le Carre
Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that. -- John Le Carre
He has the gift of quiet. -- John Le Carre
I don't break down," she announced. "Got it?"
He got it. He was already pulling back, looking ashamed of himself, but somehow he was still holding her wrist.
"I never break down. I'm a lawyer. -- John Le Carre
However closely we live together, at whatever time of day or night we sound the deepest thoughts in one another, we know nothing. -- John Le Carre
To dream in doctrines, how tidy! -- John Le Carre
In the '60s - and right up to the present day - the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a state secret. To divulge it is a crime. The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them. -- John Le Carre
He sees passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included. -- John Le Carre
Elections are a Western jerk-off. -- John Le Carre
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Theatrical Trailer (Courtesy of Focus -- John Le Carre
Power sits uneasily on those one has grown up with. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Spy. -- John Le Carre
People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem. -- John Le Carre
I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making. -- John Le Carre
To possess another language is to possess another soul. -- John Le Carre
I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention. -- John Le Carre
She's become a Russian again, he thought. When something works, she's grateful. When it doesn't work, it's life. -- John Le Carre
I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang. -- John Le Carre
Merridew might not have been the slenderest of men or the tallest. But he had grip, he had cunning and like many fat men he had unexpected resources of indignation which he was able to turn on like a flood when they were needed. -- John Le Carre
In a civilized country you can never tell. -- John Le Carre
I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man. -- John Le Carre
Why are Scots so attracted to the secret world? Smiley wondered, not for the first time in his career. Ships' engineers, Colonial administrators, spies. . . . Their heretical Scottish history drew them to distant churches, he decided. "George! -- John Le Carre
I always say South America's the only place where you cut a gentleman his suit one week and see his statue wearing it the next. -- John Le Carre
If you're growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended back. -- John Le Carre
Over them, in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note. -- John Le Carre
After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him. -- John Le Carre
Right ... What do you do for a living, Smiley?" "After the war I was at Oxford for a bit. Teaching and research. I'm in London now." "One of those clever coves, eh? -- John Le Carre
When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning. -- John Le Carre
The greatest crime is to do nothing because we can only do a little ( ... ) I feel nothing, because feeling is subversive and contrary to military discipline. Therefore I do not feel, but I fight and therefore I exist. (part I, chapter 10) -- John Le Carre
It comforted the great to deal with it and they knew, a man who could reduce any color to grey. -- John Le Carre
Arthur Braithwaite, known to Louisa and the children as God. And all right, strictly speaking Braithwaite did not exist. Why should he? Not every god has to exist in order to do his job. -- John Le Carre
Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage. -- John Le Carre
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity. -- John Le Carre
In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job. -- John Le Carre
There is no one better than a good Englishman and no one worse than a bad one. I have observed you. I think you are a good one. Mr Pine, do you know Richard Roper? -- John Le Carre
But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state. -- John Le Carre
I write and walk and swim and drink. -- John Le Carre
He was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment. -- John Le Carre
They might have you, and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company. -- John Le Carre
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. -- John Le Carre
He looks like a mixture of Humpty-Dumpty and a Cornish elf
very short and broad
and I don't think he's anyone's fool. -- John Le Carre
Arseholes who are expert at making something out of nothing [ ... ] appeared equally capable of making nothing out of something -- John Le Carre
Why and earth should an unshaven young man in a track suit be carrying a basket of oranges and yesterday's newspaper? The whole boat must of noticed him! -- John Le Carre
This is a war," Lemas replied. "It's graphic and unpleasant because it's fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it's nothing, nothing at all besides other wars - the last or the next. -- John Le Carre
People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others. -- John Le Carre
An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function: -- John Le Carre
You just happened to put your hand to your face and find it damp and you wondered what the hell Christ bothered to die for, if He ever died at all. -- John Le Carre
I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit. -- John Le Carre
By the by, he is a virgin, about eight feet tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge. Do not be alarmed. -- John Le Carre
Home's where you go when you run out of homes. -- 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. -- John Le Carre
I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name. -- John Le Carre
There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain. -- John Le Carre
Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader. -- John Le Carre
Her palm was broad and strong and dry. Its nakedness against his own was like the gift of her entire body. -- John Le Carre
Smiley was not opposed to social distinctions but he liked to make his own. -- John Le Carre
Who's an ex-diplomat of all people to complain if the wrapping is prettier than what's inside? -- John Le Carre
In Lacon's world, direct questions were the height of bad taste, but direct answers were worse. -- John Le Carre
We have to live without sympathy, don't we? That's impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really, I mean ... one can't be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold ... d'you see what I mean? -- John Le Carre
Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby. -- John Le Carre
one of those world builders who do othing but destroy, -- John Le Carre
He hated to be alone, but people bored him. Being alone was like being tired, but unable to sleep. -- John Le Carre
Society is unconcerned with the aftermath of sensation. -- John Le Carre
I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price. -- John Le Carre
The most peaceble people will do the most terrible things when they're pushed. -- John Le Carre
It was simpler in those days. We could say they'd died for their country. We didn't have to tell them the details; they didn't expect that. -- John Le Carre
The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God, -- John Le Carre
I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it. -- John Le Carre
It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three. -- John Le Carre
Perhaps we didn't win anyway. (the Cold War) Perhaps they just lost. Or perhaps, without the bonds of ideological conflict to restrain us any more, our troubles are just beginning. -- John Le Carre
[Smiley contemplates graffiti:]'Punk is destructive. Society does not need it.' The assertion caused him a moment's indecision. 'Oh, but society does,' he wanted to reply; 'society is an association of minorities. -- John Le Carre
There is no reward for love except the experience of loving, and nothing to be learned by it except humility. -- John Le Carre
Luck's just another word for destiny ... either you make your own or you're screwed. -- John Le Carre
I had been playing Shostakovich on the stereo, but without conviction. -- John Le Carre
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction. -- John Le Carre
The only reward for love is the experience of loving. -- John Le Carre
I would say that since the war, our methods-out and those of the opposition-have become much the same. I mean you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's 'policy' is benevolent, can you now? -- John Le Carre
If there's no sea-gull there's no meeting, Wicklow had said. No sea-gull means abort. That's my epitaph, thought Barley. 'There was no sea-gull, so he aborted. -- John Le Carre
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing. -- John Le Carre
There was a fellow called Smiley married Ann Sercomb, Lord Sawley's cousin. Damned pretty girl, Ann was, and went and married this fellow. Some funny little beggar in the Civil Service with an OBE and a gold watch. Sawley was damned annoyed. -- John Le Carre
Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love. -- John Le Carre
The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal. -- John Le Carre
By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way. -- John Le Carre
Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things. What do you think of i? -- John Le Carre
Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book. -- John Le Carre
People are very secretive - secret even from themselves. -- John Le Carre
Also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious. -- John Le Carre
George, you won,' said Guillam, as they walked slowly towards the car.
'Did I?' said Smiley. 'Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did. -- John Le Carre
He wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion ... -- John Le Carre
For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed. -- John Le Carre
Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double. -- John Le Carre
Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it's about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young. -- John Le Carre
When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again. -- John Le Carre
Blackmail is more effective than bribery. -- John Le Carre
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one. -- John Le Carre
There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed. -- John Le Carre
Writing doesn't get easier. Every novel is a first novel. -- John Le Carre
It was his shoes, he noticed to his pleasure, that she most objected to; and he thought: bloody good, that's what shoes are for. -- John Le Carre
Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers. -- John Le Carre
In capitalist America economic repression of the masses is institutionalised to a point which not even Lenin could have foreseen . . . "The -- John Le Carre
I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself. -- John Le Carre
But we progress, Your Graces. Inexorably we progress. Albeit at the blind man's speed, as we tap-tap along in the dark. -- John Le Carre
I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity. -- John Le Carre
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it. -- John Le Carre
You could be the perfect spy. All you need is a cause. -- John Le Carre
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie. -- John Le Carre
I know their unstinted devotion to the free-market economy, provided it's their freedom and somebody else's economy. -- John Le Carre
We're all a bunch of no-good apostates and blasphemers and murderers and fornicators and God-haters, so fuck the lot of us. For those guys, and all the guys we'd like to meet who share their perceptions, it's the Western hemisphere versus Islam, and no stops between. -- John Le Carre
A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere. -- John Le Carre
I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things. -- John Le Carre
Why am I despising you when I'm about to change your life? -- John Le Carre
He appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes. -- John Le Carre
Without a pen in my hand I can't think. -- John Le Carre
Why did I desert Labour? Total bloody disillusionment. The party was a corpse. It had no ideology, it became detached, old, spineless and needed to go. -- John Le Carre
Gossip till the cows come home. -- John Le Carre
One sacrificed for many. It's not pretty, I know, choosing who it'll be
turning the plan into people. -- John Le Carre
The Party knows more about us than we know ourselves,' the woman replied. -- John Le Carre
Some men will never be heroes, some heroes will never be men, he thought, with urgent acknowledgements to Joseph Conrad. -- John Le Carre
As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way. -- John Le Carre
The easiest and cheapest trick for any leader is to take his country to war on false pretenses. -- John Le Carre
You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty. -- John Le Carre
Information is not knowledge, mind you. -- John Le Carre
And your wife, she's in the pink and so on?"
His expressions were also boyish.
"Very bonny, thank you," said Smiley, trying gallantly to respond in kind. -- John Le Carre
I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other's frotiers, we are the no-men of this no-man's land. -- John Le Carre
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story. -- John Le Carre
Love means having something to betray. -- John Le Carre
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. -- John Le Carre
We pretend a lot of things aren't there. Or we pretend that other things are more important. That's how we survive. -- John Le Carre
Let us honour if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one. Or -- John Le Carre
The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead. -- John Le Carre
A committee is an animal with four back legs. -- John Le Carre
What woman has ever stopped by a want of information? She felt. And despised him for not acting in accordance with her feelings. -- John Le Carre
It's a little difficult to know when to trust you people and when not. -- John Le Carre
The merit of 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,' then - or its offence, depending where you stood - was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible. -- John Le Carre
Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West. -- John Le Carre
what is conviction? How do we identify it? How can we know that we should be guided by it? Is it to be found in the heart, or in the intellect? And what if it is only to be found in the one and not the other? -- John Le Carre
Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves. -- John Le Carre
I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton -- John Le Carre
Page 56 The Honorable Schoolboy
Czarist imperialist running dogs drank tasteless coffee with divisive, deviationist, chauvinist, Stalinists and were proud of it. -- John Le Carre
Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided. -- John Le Carre
The monstrosity of this, reaching Smiley through a thickening wall of spiritual exhaustion, left him momentarily speechless. -- John Le Carre
But hatred was really not an emotion which he could sustain for any length of time, unless it was the obverse side of love. -- John Le Carre
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. -- John Le Carre
She had the experience to suffer with discretion. -- John Le Carre
When you are reading something, Mr. Mundy, ask yourself why you are reading it. Are you reading something for information? That is one reason. Or are you reading it for knowledge? Information is only the path, Mr. Mundy. The goal is knowledge. -- John Le Carre
It was the skinny boy's stillness, he decided later. Those lines of age in a face as young as mine. His look of winter on a lovely spring day. -- John Le Carre
Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman. Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me. -- John Le Carre
Spying is waiting. -- John Le Carre
They loved each other and believed they loved mankind, they fought each other and believed they fought the world. -- John Le Carre
Pain observed is journalistic pain. It's diplomatic pain. It's television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. -- John Le Carre
For a long moment, while Brock stood off observing them, Ned and Barley appraised one another as only Englishmen can who are of the same height and class and shape of head. -- John Le Carre
It was a charming fantasy of romantics that the spies would stop spying, that political conflict would end and politicians would tell the truth. Unfortunately that has not been the case. -- John Le Carre
Writers are two-home men - they want a place outside and a place within. -- John Le Carre
There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle no stone will be left standing. -- John Le Carre
Survival ... is an infinite capacity for suspicion. -- John Le Carre
Life was to be a search, or nothing! But it was the fear that it was nothing that drove me forward. Every encounter was an encounter with myself. -- John Le Carre
I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack. -- John Le Carre
I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services. -- John Le Carre
Some fieldmen, and particularly the clever ones, take a perverse pride in not knowing the whole picture. Their art consists in the deft handling of loose ends, and stops there stubbornly. -- John Le Carre
Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present. -- John Le Carre
If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself. -- John Le Carre
Let's die of it before we're too old. -- John Le Carre
Charlie alone knew he was a ghost. -- John Le Carre
Intelligence work has one moral law - it is justified by results. -- John Le Carre
The striver in him knew that his first aim must be to rise in the system he dreamed of liberating. -- John Le Carre
Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic. -- John Le Carre
We lie to one another every day, in the sweetest way, often unconsciously. We dress ourselves and compose ourselves in order to present ourselves to one another. -- John Le Carre
Breath and caught the -- John Le Carre
We cannot live in a bubble, Mr. Mundy. Comfortable ignorance is not a solution. In German student societies that I was not permitted to join, they made a toast: 'Better to be a salamander, and live in the fire.'" After -- John Le Carre
Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage. -- John Le Carre
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. -- John Le Carre
A terrorist for Karen is someone who has a bomb but no aeroplane.
Ch. 4 -- John Le Carre
It dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle-age without ever being young, and that he was, in the nicest possible way, "on the shelf". -- John Le Carre
It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies? -- John Le Carre
All men are born free: just not for long. -- John Le Carre
Even his Englishness was a well-kept secret. -- John Le Carre
When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats. -- John Le Carre
It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D. -- John Le Carre
It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can. -- John Le Carre
There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo. -- John Le Carre
You should have died when I killed you. -- John Le Carre
The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous -- John Le Carre
No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn. -- John Le Carre
There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur. -- John Le Carre
It was like feeding a small child. You couldn't over load the spoon. -- John Le Carre
America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember. -- John Le Carre
In moments of crisis our thoughts do not run consecutively but rather sweep over us in waves or intuition and experience ... -- John Le Carre
Power expands through the distribution of secrecy. -- John Le Carre
To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul. German is such a language. Once you have it in your head, you can go there anytime, you can close the door, you have a refuge. -- John Le Carre
I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with. -- John Le Carre
Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong. -- John Le Carre
With people you see in them what you already know. -- John Le Carre
For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict. -- John Le Carre