Top 100 Carre Quotes

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

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #1866
#2. What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #2431
#3. 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

Carre Quotes #4504
#4. 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

Carre Quotes #6143
#5. 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

Carre Quotes #11072
#6. 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

Carre Quotes #32118
#7. he asked, in a more tentative tone, "What's the

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #37639
#8. 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

Carre Quotes #39567
#9. Just because you're a different size doesn't mean you're sitting on the couch eating bonbons all day long watching TV.

Carre Otis

Carre Quotes #54077
#10. 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

Carre Quotes #69506
#11. I've always had difficulties with female characters.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #72463
#12. 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

Carre Quotes #77602
#13. 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

Carre Quotes #81645
#14. I write and walk and swim and drink.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #83087
#15. Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #84508
#16. Austerity pleased her - it gave her the comfort of sacrifice.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #84773
#17. 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

Carre Quotes #89628
#18. Over them, in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #96370
#19. To give the best of the day to your work is most important.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #99757
#20. Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #101317
#21. In old grimy streets, in isolated and decaying houses, sometimes far from the Vieux Carre, in little used and secluded cemeteries, there still sluggishly circulates the ebbing blood of the past, of a vigorous and vividly hued past.

Clarence John Laughlin

Carre Quotes #103423
#22. 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

Carre Quotes #112695
#23. And what's life if it isn't invention? Starting with inventing yourself.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #115907
#24. 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

Carre Quotes #118741
#25. 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

Carre Quotes #124415
#26. 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

Carre Quotes #125459
#27. There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #126289
#28. 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

Carre Quotes #128233
#29. Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #131260
#30. It's a little difficult to know when to trust you people and when not.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #136838
#31. 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

Carre Quotes #137275
#32. Why am I despising you when I'm about to change your life?

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #138846
#33. Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #138848
#34. I am a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother. I am a friend of women and I am their advocate.

Carre Otis

Carre Quotes #139267
#35. The striver in him knew that his first aim must be to rise in the system he dreamed of liberating.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #156569
#36. I think that we can't deny the public's want for balancing out the images that are out there depicting women. Not all of us are 17 and a size two.

Carre Otis

Carre Quotes #157273
#37. Some men will never be heroes, some heroes will never be men, he thought, with urgent acknowledgements to Joseph Conrad.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #159083
#38. Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #167315
#39. Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they're making a fantasy about themselves.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #167751
#40. My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #177732
#41. Survival ... is an infinite capacity for suspicion.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #178093
#42. 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

Carre Quotes #184737
#43. 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

Carre Quotes #185131
#44. He sees passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #186269
#45. The only reward for love is the experience of loving.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #187035
#46. There comes a moment as a parent when you realize you will no longer be the center of your child's universe.

Carre Otis

Carre Quotes #195881
#47. 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

Carre Quotes #197795
#48. 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

Carre Quotes #199306
#49. 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

Carre Quotes #202027
#50. 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

Carre Quotes #202457
#51. 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

Carre Quotes #215984
#52. My weight fluctuated when I was 30, and I did the unthinkable - I stepped out as a plus-sized model.

Carre Otis

Carre Quotes #220424
#53. 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

Carre Quotes #221966
#54. My own path towards wellness has been a long and dynamic one. It's taught me that healing from the inside out takes time and there can be great value in various sources of guidance.

Carre Otis

Carre Quotes #227894
#55. 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

Carre Quotes #229070
#56. He met failure as one day he would probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #231392
#57. More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #232568
#58. The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #234448
#59. His cock is inked.

Georgia Le Carre

Carre Quotes #244680
#60. Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism ... when had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom?

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #246721
#61. 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

Carre Quotes #252047
#62. 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

Carre Quotes #256713
#63. I was in a sushi bar and it dawned on me - how could I discriminate between a cow and a fish?

Carre Otis

Carre Quotes #276834
#64. 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

Carre Quotes #282774
#65. 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

Carre Quotes #291188
#66. I was essentially paid to perpetuate the myth that we are all, or should at least try to be, 17 and a size 2 forever.

Carre Otis

Carre Quotes #305008
#67. 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

Carre Quotes #314462
#68. I had been playing Shostakovich on the stereo, but without conviction.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #327239
#69. Smiley was not opposed to social distinctions but he liked to make his own.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #327451
#70. He's going to save the world before he leaves it if it kills him.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #332222
#71. Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #339603
#72. Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #344627
#73. You give the air of looking for someone, Sophie had said. But I think the missing person is yourself. Each

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #349437
#74. 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

Carre Quotes #353849
#75. I had my first seizure, and I had to go in for heart surgery.

Carre Otis

Carre Quotes #356830
#76. If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #363731
#77. If a decade of diplomatic life had taught Toby one thing, it was to treat every crisis as normal and soluble.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #364071
#78. 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

Carre Quotes #365446
#79. 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

Carre Quotes #380300
#80. Just as young people absorb all kinds of messages from the media, young girls learn what it means to be a woman by watching the older women in their lives.

Carre Otis

Carre Quotes #381229
#81. A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #383007
#82. 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

Carre Quotes #385520
#83. Intelligence work has one moral law - it is justified by results.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #399280
#84. 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

Carre Quotes #399687
#85. I love you,' he repeated. 'All my failures were preparations for meeting you.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #408105
#86. The pressure was if I didn't get into that dress size someone else would - someone else would get the job.

Carre Otis

Carre Quotes #410407
#87. Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #410966
#88. I grew up on antibiotics. Every ailment - sore throats, earaches, flus - warranted a trip to the doctor and in most cases some kind of prescription.

Carre Otis

Carre Quotes #417070
#89. 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

Carre Quotes #418363
#90. Charlie alone knew he was a ghost.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #419079
#91. I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #425042
#92. 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

Carre Quotes #428131
#93. Forgive me. Sometimes an answer can vary with a context, if you follow me

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #431031
#94. I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #431676
#95. 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

Carre Quotes #440239
#96. Eating disorders, body dysmorphia and a general dissatisfaction with one's life and body seems to ail too many young people.

Carre Otis

Carre Quotes #441238
#97. 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

Carre Quotes #451288
#98. 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

Carre Quotes #454889
#99. What that judge did is immoral. Here in Panama when we bribe somebody we expect loyalty.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #460231
#100. Let's die of it before we're too old.

John Le Carre

Carre Quotes #465171

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