Top 100 Carre's Quotes
#1. Fast-paced from start to finish, 'The Honourable Schoolboy' is fired by le Carre's conviction regarding evil done and its consequences.
Alan Furst
#2. John le Carre's 'The Night Manager' is a relentlessly exhilarating thriller with profound emotional depths.
Susanne Bier
#3. Le Carre's voice - patrician, cold, brilliant and amused - was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction.
Alan Furst
#4. You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.
John Le Carre
#5. Pain observed is journalistic pain. It's diplomatic pain. It's television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set.
John Le Carre
#6. 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
#7. I believe that as women, we must commit ourselves to sustaining the progress made by our foremothers who fought so hard for women's equality and liberation.
Carre Otis
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.
John Le Carre
#11. Never confess, my friend," he advised drowsily, clasping Melik's hand. "If you confess, they will keep you there forever.
John Le Carre
#12. 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
#13. It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
John Le Carre
#14. It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.
John Le Carre
#15. In Lacon's world, direct questions were the height of bad taste, but direct answers were worse.
John Le Carre
#16. It was him taught Idi Amin's lads how to extract voluntary confessions with the aid of an electric cattle-prod. Our chum likes them English and he likes them with a dirty past. He
John Le Carre
#17. There was a pause. Mendel said: 'It's the devil you don't know that gets you.
John Le Carre
#18. He has his chin on his chest and his eyes down. He is thinking of his new baby, his new novel, tomorrow's dance contest. He is thinking of everything except what he is thinking about.
John Le Carre
#19. 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
#21. The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.
John Le Carre
#22. I was in a peacetime army. It was like something out of a Le Carre novel: studying the habits of your enemy. It was very exciting. It's interesting living life as a civilian, then on Friday night you're parachuting into a foreign country.
Steve Truglia
#23. It was his shoes, he noticed to his pleasure, that she most objected to; and he thought: bloody good, that's what shoes are for.
John Le Carre
#24. The ground on which you once stood is cut away. You have become a citizen of No Man's Land. I send you my greetings.
the closing lines of Smiley's letter to Karla persuading him to defect.
John Le Carre
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
John Le Carre
#28. There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo.
John Le Carre
#29. When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
John Le Carre
#30. I feel like it's my responsibility to honestly cover a lot of subjects in part because I have two little girls and I really want them when they grow up to have a voice.
Carre Otis
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Because coffee with sugar isn't coffee, it's dessert. It might as well be an energy drink.
Carre Armstrong Gardner
#35. I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no one else can make them.
John Le Carre
#36. For John le Carre, it was always who's betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the '30s, it's a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.
Alan Furst
#37. When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.
John Le Carre
#38. This is a war," Lemas replied. "It's graphic and unpleasant because it's fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it's nothing, nothing at all besides other wars - the last or the next.
John Le Carre
#39. We have to live without sympathy, don't we? That's impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really, I mean ... one can't be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold ... d'you see what I mean?
John Le Carre
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. The doctor asked what my diet was like and I had to sit down and realize it's not normal, and hadn't been normal for about 20 years.
Carre Otis
#43. There was a fellow called Smiley married Ann Sercomb, Lord Sawley's cousin. Damned pretty girl, Ann was, and went and married this fellow. Some funny little beggar in the Civil Service with an OBE and a gold watch. Sawley was damned annoyed.
John Le Carre
#44. 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
#45. [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
#46. 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
#47. Home's where you go when you run out of homes.
John Le Carre
#48. What you get in the Cold War is 'the wilderness of mirrors' where you have to figure out what's good and what's evil. That's good for John le Carre, but not me.
Alan Furst
#49. It was the skinny boy's stillness, he decided later. Those lines of age in a face as young as mine. His look of winter on a lovely spring day.
John Le Carre
#50. 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
#51. Who's an ex-diplomat of all people to complain if the wrapping is prettier than what's inside?
John Le Carre
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
John Le Carre
#57. He's going to save the world before he leaves it if it kills him.
John Le Carre
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. There comes a moment as a parent when you realize you will no longer be the center of your child's universe.
Carre Otis
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. It's a little difficult to know when to trust you people and when not.
John Le Carre
#64. And what's life if it isn't invention? Starting with inventing yourself.
John Le Carre
#65. Eating disorders, body dysmorphia and a general dissatisfaction with one's life and body seems to ail too many young people.
Carre Otis
#66. I've always had difficulties with female characters.
John Le Carre
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. he asked, in a more tentative tone, "What's the
John Le Carre
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
John Le Carre
#76. His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were.
John Le Carre
#77. Motherhood has brought me many joys and insights, but the new perspective it granted me on the role I had inadvertently played in young women's lives for the 2 decades I spent in the modeling industry was downright sobering.
Carre Otis
#78. Hotel's full up, I'm afraid, Mr. Roper, Jonathan rehearsed in another last-ditch effort to fend off the inevitable. Herr Meister is desolated. A temporary clerk has made an unpardonable error. However, we have managed to obtain rooms for you at the Baur au Lac, et cetera.
John Le Carre
#79. Anorexia was there for me before I got into modeling, but because of the arena and the demands, the disease really got out of control for me. It's like being an alcoholic and going and being a bartender.
Carre Otis
#80. Waking and sleeping she had demanded to know where she belonged in a white man's world, and how and where she should invest her ambition and her humanity
John Le Carre
#81. You're history, Donohue. You think countries run the fucking world! Go back to fucking Sunday school. It's 'God save our multinational' they're singing these days.
John Le Carre
#82. When I consider the deeper meaning of yoga, I realize it's about a lot more than simply performing a variety of postures on a mat.
Carre Otis
#83. 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
#84. Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.
John Le Carre
#85. Luck's just another word for destiny ... either you make your own or you're screwed.
John Le Carre
#86. The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story.
John Le Carre
#87. I know their unstinted devotion to the free-market economy, provided it's their freedom and somebody else's economy.
John Le Carre
#88. People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem.
John Le Carre
#89. 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
#90. 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.
John Le Carre
#91. Todd and Larry were Quinn's people. They were clean-limbed and pretty and, for a man of my age, ludicrously youthful.
John Le Carre
#92. 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
#93. When you become a parent, it's not all about you anymore.
Carre Otis
#94. One sacrificed for many. It's not pretty, I know, choosing who it'll be
turning the plan into people.
John Le Carre
#95. Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are.
John Le Carre
#96. There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.
John Le Carre
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carre novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That's a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few.
Nick Harkaway
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