John Le Carre Quotes

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

They might have you, and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company. ~ John Le Carre

One more consideration also weighed with Smiley, though in his paper he is too gentlemanly to mention it. A lot of ghosts walked in those post-fall days, and one of them was a fear that, buried somewhere in the Circus, lay Bill Haydon's chosen successor: that Bill had brought him on, recruited and educated him against the very day when he himself, one way or another, would fade from the scene. Sam was originally a Haydon nominee. His later victimisation by Haydon could easily have been a put-up job. Who was to say, in that very jumpy atmosphere, that Sam Collins, manoeuvring for readmission, was not the heir elect to Haydon's treachery?
For all these reasons George Smiley put on his raincoat and got himself out on the street. Willingly, no doubt - for at heart, he was still a case man. Even his detractors gave him that. ~ John Le Carre

Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain. ~ 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

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 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

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

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

Everywhere that air of conspiracy which generates amongst people who have been up since dawn – of superiority almost, derived from the common experience of having seen the night disappear and the morning come. ~ 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

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

[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

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

The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal. ~ John Le Carre

Why am I despising you when I'm about to change your life? ~ 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

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

I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now i wish i could distinguish them. ~ 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

And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackens, that his life had consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order, and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it. ~ John Le Carre

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

I think John le Carre is, at 77, the greatest living writer alive. He is a master craftsman. ~ Philip Kerr

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

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

Spying is waiting. ~ John Le Carre

Most of all he asked about their philosophy. To Leamas that was the most difficult question of all. 'What do you mean, a philosophy?' he replied. 'We're not Marxists, we're nothing. Just people.' 'Are you Christians, then?' 'Not many, I shouldn't think. I don't know many.' 'What makes them do it, then?' Fiedler persisted. 'They must have a philosophy.' 'Why must they? Perhaps they don't know, don't even care. Not everyone has a philosophy,' Leamas answered, a little helplessly. ~ 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

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

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

He knew then what it was that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England; it was the caring about little things - the faith in ordinary life; the simplicity that made you break up a bit of bread into a paper bag, walk down to the beach and throw it to the gulls. It was this respect for triviality which he had never been allowed to possess; whether it was bread of the seagulls or love ~ John Le Carre

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

Western teaching institutions that refuse to acknowledge today's taboos are by definition subversive. Tell the new zealots of Washington that in the making of Israel a monstrous human crime was committed and they will call you an anti-Semite. Tell them there was no Garden of Creation and they will call you a dangerous cynic. Tell them God is what man invented to compensate for his ignorance of science and they will call you a Communist. ~ John Le Carre

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

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

I will read anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carre, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker. ~ Hillary Clinton

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

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed. ~ John Le Carre

The row of villas which lines Western Avenue is like a row of pink graves in a field of grey; an architectural image of middle age. Their uniformity is the discipline of growing old, of dying without violence and living without success. They are houses which have got the better of their occupants, whom they change at will, and do not change themselves. Furniture vans glide respectfully among them like hearses, discreetly removing the dead and introducing the living. Now and then some tenant will raise his hand, expending pots of paint on the woodwork or labour on the garden, but his efforts no more alter the house than flowers a hospital ward, and the grass will grow its own way, like grass on a grave. ~ 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

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

It was the most monotonous day of my life," he replied without a second's hesitation. Then his rigid face broke and re-formed itself into the best smile ever, so that for a moment he really did look as if he had slipped through the bars of whatever confined him. "As a matter of fact, I thought you quite excellent," he said. This time she did not object to his choice of adjective. "Will you crash the car now, please, Jose? This will do me fine. I'll die here." And before he could stop her, she had grabbed his hand and kissed him hard on the knuckle of his thumb. ~ 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

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

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

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 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 love you,' he repeated. 'All my failures were preparations for meeting you. ~ John Le Carre

Beyond the typhoon shelters, ships slid past them, lighted buildings on the march, and the junks hobbled in their wakes. Inland, the Island whined and clanged and throbbed, and the huge slums twinkled like jewel boxes opened by the deceptive beauty of the night. Presiding over them, glimpsed between the dipping finger of the masts, sat the black Peak, Victoria, her sodden face shrouded with moonlit skeins; the goddess, the freedom, the lure of all that wild striving in the valley. They ~ John Le Carre

There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing," Ann liked to say
it was a favourite apologia, indeed, for many of her misdemeanours. "There is only one reason for doing something. And that's because you want to." Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of. ~ 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

Alec, what do you believe in? Don't laugh-tell me.' She waited and at last he said:
'I believe an eleven bus will take me to Hammersmith. I don't believe it's driven by Father Christmas. ~ 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

Smiley himself was one of those solitaires who seem to have come into the world fully educated at the age of eighteen. Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country's enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed. Assimilation is his highest aim, he learns to love the crowds who pass him in the street without a glance; he clings to them for his anonimity and his safety. His fear makes him servile - he could embrace the shoppers who jostle him in their impatience, and force him from the pavement. He could adore the officials, the police, the bus conductors, for the terse indifference of their attitudes. (ch. 9) ~ 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

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

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

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

God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow. ~ John Le Carre

John Le Carre said that authenticity is less important than plausibility. ~ Gordon R. Dickson

I've studied the disease, I've lived in the swamp. It is my informed conclusion that we are suffering, as an ex-great nation, from top-down corporate rot. And that's not just the judgement of an ailing old fart. A lot of people in my Service make a profession of not seeing things in black and white. Do not confuse me with them. I'm a late-onset, red-toothed radical with balls. Still with me? ~ 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

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

The greatest threat to mankind comes from the renunciation of individual scruple in favor of institutional denominators ... Real heroism lies, as it always will, not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage. Which, come to think of it, is what we used to admire in our Christian savior ~ 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

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

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man. ~ John Le Carre

The embassy's front door was of bulletproof steel lined with a veneer of English oak. You attained it by touching a button in a silent lift. The royal crest, in this air-conditioned stillness, suggested silicone and funeral parlours. The windows, like the doors, had been toughened to frustrate the Irish and tinted to frustrate the sun. Not a whisper of the real world penetrated. The silent traffic, cranes, shipping, old town and new town, the brigade of women in orange tunics gathering leaves along the central reservation of the Avenida Balboa, were mere specimens in Her Majesty's inspection chamber. From the moment you set foot in British extraterritorial airspace, you were looking in, not out. - ~ John Le Carre

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

There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle no stone will be left standing. ~ 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

To dream in doctrines, how tidy! ~ John Le Carre

People are very secretive - secret even from themselves. ~ John Le Carre

Sometimes you do it to save face, thought Jerry, other times you just do it because you haven't done your job unless you've scared yourself to death. Other times again, you go in order to remind yourself that survival is a fluke. But mostly you go because the others go; for machismo; and because in order to belong you must share. ~ 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

Every man has his personal devil waiting for him somewhere. ~ 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

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

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

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

It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day. ~ John Le Carre

Charlie alone knew he was a ghost. ~ 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

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

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

And what's life if it isn't invention? Starting with inventing yourself. ~ John Le Carre

There were times when he confronted his own image as a man confronts an empty valley, and the vision propelled him forward again to experience as despair compels us to extinction. Sometimes he was like a man in flight, but running toward the enemy, desperate to feel upon his vanishing body the blows that would prove his being; desperate to imprint upon his sad conformity the mark of real purpose, desperate perhaps, as Leclerc had hinted, to abdicate his conscience in order to discover God. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was in late age, yet his tradecraft had never been better; for the first time in his career, he held the advantage over his old adversary.

On the other hand, that adversary had acquired a human face of disconcerting clarity. It was no brute whom Smiley was pursuing with such mastery, no unqualified fanatic after all, no automaton. It was a man; and one whose downfall, if Smiley chose to bring it about, would be caused by nothing more sinister than excessive love, a weakness with which Smiley himself, from his own tangled life, was eminently familiar. ~ John Le Carre