Top 100 Le Carre Quotes
#1. 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
#2. John Le Carre said that authenticity is less important than plausibility.
Gordon R. Dickson
#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. 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
#5. Fast-paced from start to finish, 'The Honourable Schoolboy' is fired by le Carre's conviction regarding evil done and its consequences.
Alan Furst
#6. John le Carre's 'The Night Manager' is a relentlessly exhilarating thriller with profound emotional depths.
Susanne Bier
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. I think John le Carre is, at 77, the greatest living writer alive. He is a master craftsman.
Philip Kerr
#10. 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
#11. His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were.
John Le Carre
#12. What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
John Le Carre
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. he asked, in a more tentative tone, "What's the
John Le Carre
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. I've always had difficulties with female characters.
John Le Carre
#21. 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
#22. 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
#24. Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant.
John Le Carre
#25. Austerity pleased her - it gave her the comfort of sacrifice.
John Le Carre
#26. 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
#27. Over them, in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note.
John Le Carre
#28. To give the best of the day to your work is most important.
John Le Carre
#29. Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.
John Le Carre
#30. 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
#31. And what's life if it isn't invention? Starting with inventing yourself.
John Le Carre
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
John Le Carre
#36. 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
#37. Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.
John Le Carre
#38. It's a little difficult to know when to trust you people and when not.
John Le Carre
#39. 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
#40. Why am I despising you when I'm about to change your life?
John Le Carre
#41. Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
John Le Carre
#42. The striver in him knew that his first aim must be to rise in the system he dreamed of liberating.
John Le Carre
#43. Some men will never be heroes, some heroes will never be men, he thought, with urgent acknowledgements to Joseph Conrad.
John Le Carre
#44. Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.
John Le Carre
#45. Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they're making a fantasy about themselves.
John Le Carre
#46. My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.
John Le Carre
#47. Survival ... is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
John Le Carre
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. He sees passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included.
John Le Carre
#51. The only reward for love is the experience of loving.
John Le Carre
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. He met failure as one day he would probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary.
John Le Carre
#60. More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
John Le Carre
#61. The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
John Le Carre
#63. Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism ... when had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom?
John Le Carre
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. I had been playing Shostakovich on the stereo, but without conviction.
John Le Carre
#70. Smiley was not opposed to social distinctions but he liked to make his own.
John Le Carre
#71. He's going to save the world before he leaves it if it kills him.
John Le Carre
#72. Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.
John Le Carre
#73. Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
John Le Carre
#74. You give the air of looking for someone, Sophie had said. But I think the missing person is yourself. Each
John Le Carre
#75. 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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#80. A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.
John Le Carre
#81. 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
#82. Intelligence work has one moral law - it is justified by results.
John Le Carre
#83. 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
#84. I love you,' he repeated. 'All my failures were preparations for meeting you.
John Le Carre
#85. Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.
John Le Carre
#86. 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
#88. I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
John Le Carre
#89. 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
#90. Forgive me. Sometimes an answer can vary with a context, if you follow me
John Le Carre
#91. I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.
John Le Carre
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. What that judge did is immoral. Here in Panama when we bribe somebody we expect loyalty.
John Le Carre
#97. Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman. Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me.
John Le Carre
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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