John Le Carre quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Le Carre

John Le Carre Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from John Le Carre on Wise Famous Quotes.

It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.

He appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes.

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.

Let's die of it before we're too old.

Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant.

I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.

With people you see in them what you already know.

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.

Her palm was broad and strong and dry. Its nakedness against his own was like the gift of her entire body.

What that judge did is immoral. Here in Panama when we bribe somebody we expect loyalty.

Every man has his personal devil waiting for him somewhere.

Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.

But gossip must see its characters in black and white, equip them with sins and motives easily conveyed in the shorthand of conversation.

Everyone who is not happy must be shot.

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.

Love means having something to betray.

George, this is history," Lacon protested weakly. "This is not today.

A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.

In capitalist America economic repression of the masses is institutionalised to a point which not even Lenin could have foreseen . . . "The

Breath and caught the

I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. - W. H. AUDEN

You should have died when I killed you.

If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.

But hatred was really not an emotion which he could sustain for any length of time, unless it was the obverse side of love.

The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.

one of those world builders who do othing but destroy,

It was like feeding a small child. You couldn't over load the spoon.

Survival ... is an infinite capacity for suspicion.

His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were.

Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.

In Lacon's world, direct questions were the height of bad taste, but direct answers were worse.

I think that all writers feel alienated ... I know that I do ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated.

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

She had the experience to suffer with discretion.

It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.

I move my lips when I read
I'm painfully slow
so I like really good English.

I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.

Gossip till the cows come home.

One sacrificed for many. It's not pretty, I know, choosing who it'll be
turning the plan into people.

To possess another language is to possess another soul.

Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism ... when had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom?

In a civilized country you can never tell.

What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?

Her instinct was to defend, to hoard the treasures of her life, to build about herself the symbols of normal existence.

There is no reward for love except the experience of loving, and nothing to be learned by it except humility.

Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are.

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.

All men are born free: just not for long.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous

The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.

Society is unconcerned with the aftermath of sensation.

Luck's just another word for destiny ... either you make your own or you're screwed.

No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

Band above her and calls to somebody she

He wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion ...

If a decade of diplomatic life had taught Toby one thing, it was to treat every crisis as normal and soluble.

Austerity pleased her - it gave her the comfort of sacrifice.

The only reward for love is the experience of loving.

A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.

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.

The driver was holding open the rear door. He was young and blond, a boy in his prime.

Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.

Home's where you go when you run out of homes.

We pretend a lot of things aren't there. Or we pretend that other things are more important. That's how we survive.

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

But we progress, Your Graces. Inexorably we progress. Albeit at the blind man's speed, as we tap-tap along in the dark.

Power sits uneasily on those one has grown up with. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Spy.

I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.

They might have you, and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company.

Who's an ex-diplomat of all people to complain if the wrapping is prettier than what's inside?

he asked, in a more tentative tone, "What's the

I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.

Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.

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.

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.

The easiest and cheapest trick for any leader is to take his country to war on false pretenses.

Smiley was not opposed to social distinctions but he liked to make his own.

As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

It comforted the great to deal with it and they knew, a man who could reduce any color to grey.

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.

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.

It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?

Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they're making a fantasy about themselves.

In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery ...

I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

Writing doesn't get easier. Every novel is a first novel.

They would expect him to be afraid; for his service pursued traitors as the eye of God followed Cain across the desert.

Odd," he remarked finally. "One has no sense of shock. Why is that, Peter? You know me. Why is it?

Intelligence work has one moral law - it is justified by results.

Blackmail is more effective than bribery.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

You could be the perfect spy. All you need is a cause.

The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.

Over them, in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note.