Top 100 John Le Carre Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.
John Le Carre
#5. Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they're making a fantasy about themselves.
John Le Carre
#6. 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
#7. He sees passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included.
John Le Carre
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. He met failure as one day he would probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary.
John Le Carre
#13. More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
John Le Carre
#14. 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
#15. You give the air of looking for someone, Sophie had said. But I think the missing person is yourself. Each
John Le Carre
#16. If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
John Le Carre
#17. A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.
John Le Carre
#18. Intelligence work has one moral law - it is justified by results.
John Le Carre
#19. I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
John Le Carre
#20. I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.
John Le Carre
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. What that judge did is immoral. Here in Panama when we bribe somebody we expect loyalty.
John Le Carre
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Let us honour if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one. Or
John Le Carre
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Some problems - take Ireland - were insoluble, but you would never get the Americans to admit anything was insoluble.
John Le Carre
#30. I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
John Le Carre
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.
John Le Carre
#34. 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
#35. There was only now [ ... ] There was no tomorrow because tomorrow was the excuse. There was now or there was nowhere.
John Le Carre
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. With people you see in them what you already know.
John Le Carre
#40. '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
#41. 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
#42. Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
John Le Carre
#43. I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.
John Le Carre
#44. God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow.
John Le Carre
#45. But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
John Le Carre
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
John Le Carre
#51. Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.
John Le Carre
#52. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Theatrical Trailer (Courtesy of Focus
John Le Carre
#53. The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
John Le Carre
#54. People are very secretive - secret even from themselves.
John Le Carre
#55. 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
#58. [My novels] introduce levels of intelligence ... moral doubt [and] self-doubt, which may not pertain [to real-world espionage].
John Le Carre
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. A terrorist for Karen is someone who has a bomb but no aeroplane.
Ch. 4
John Le Carre
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
John Le Carre
#67. 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
#68. They loved each other and believed they loved mankind, they fought each other and believed they fought the world.
John Le Carre
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.
John Le Carre
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. He wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion ...
John Le Carre
#78. Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.
John Le Carre
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Power sits uneasily on those one has grown up with. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Spy.
John Le Carre
#82. She had the experience to suffer with discretion.
John Le Carre
#83. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes
John Le Carre
#91. They might have you, and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company.
John Le Carre
#92. 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
#93. America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.
John Le Carre
#94. 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
#95. Writing doesn't get easier. Every novel is a first novel.
John Le Carre
#97. It comforted the great to deal with it and they knew, a man who could reduce any color to grey.
John Le Carre
#98. Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
John Le Carre
#99. 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
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