John le Carre Quotes

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

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

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

The only reward for love is the experience of loving.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak. What I see in my country, progressively over these years, is that the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. The rich have become indifferent through a philosophy of greed, and the poorer have become hopeless because they're not properly cared for. That's actually something that is happening in many Western societies. Your own, I am told, is not free from it.

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

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.

I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.

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

Blackmail is more effective than bribery.

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

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

Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.

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.

Most of us live in a condition of secrecy: secret desires, secret appetites, secret hatreds and relationship with the institutions which is extremely intense and uncomfortable. These are, to me, a part of the ordinary human condition. So I don't think I'm writing about abnormal things. ... Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton

There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

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.

People are very secretive - secret even from themselves.

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

Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

George Smiley: [quoting an old letter from Bill Haydon about Jim Prideaux] He has that heavy quiet that commands. He's my other half. Between us we'd make one marvelous man. He asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends, and I'm vastly tickled by the compliment. He's virgin, about eight foot tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge

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

Everyone who is not happy must be shot.

There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo.

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.

A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.

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.

When it comes to recruiting people for the secret world, what the recruiters are looking for is pretty much what I had. I was unanchored, looking for an institution to look after me. I had a bit of larceny. I understood larceny. I understood the natural criminality in people - because it was - it was all around me. And I have no doubt there was a chunk of it inside me too. Once I found that identity, it took root in me. It exactly - it gelled with the world that I'd known in the past.

How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre.

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.

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

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.

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

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

The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.

Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.

Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

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

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

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.

The pharmaceutical corporations are engaged in the systematic corruption of the medical profession, country by country

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.

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.

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.