John le Carré Quotes

93 Sourced Quotes

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

John le Carré
Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishenss or indifference. Woodrew knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not.

John le Carré
"This is a war," Leamas 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 beside other wars – the last or the next."

John le Carré
Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.

John le Carré
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 Carré
In my heart I am free. You have seen only the bad things in me, the drink, the fear, the lies we live. But deep inside me burns a new and blessed light.

John le Carré
In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire.

John le Carré
But Smiley had a second reason which was fear, the secret fear that follows every professional to his grave.

John le Carré
A mole is a deep penetration agent so called because he burrows deep into the fabric of Western imperialism.

John le Carré
Why is it that so many men of small stature have more courage than men of size?

John le Carré
You cannot make a case for not spying on terrorist organizations. You've got to spy the hell out of them.

John le Carré
"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 Carré
It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck, and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.

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

John le Carré
Because we are so unfamiliar with the motivation of the people we are dealing with, we are more afraid of them than we need to be.

John le Carré
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 Carré
Once, catastrophically, I appeared in one of my own films. I had about eight words to say, and we did sixteen takes.

John le Carré
I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.

John le Carré
Graham Greene once referred to a chip of ice that has to be in the writer's heart. And that is the strain: that you must abstain from relationships and yet at the same time engage in them. There you have, I think, the real metaphysical relationship between the writer and the spy.

John le Carré
We were both hybrids: I by birth, he by education. We had both taken too many steps away from the country that had borne us to belong anywhere with ease.

John le Carré
I always argue that you should not accept the value of good reviews, because if you do you have to accept the bad ones.

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

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

John le Carré
He worked for the fleshy side of the Foreign Office and his job consisted of lunching visiting dignitaries whom no one else would have entertained in his woodshed.

John le Carré
We were not faced (in the cold war) in a conflict with people who are prepared to die for their cause. We weren't in conflict with people whose idea is to kill as many as they could.

John le Carré
There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.

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

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

John le Carré
[She] reports that [the company] recently donated fifty million dollars to a major U.S. teaching hospital, plus salaries and expenses for three top clinicians and six research assistants. Corruption of university Common Room affiliations is even easier: professorial chairs, biotech labs, research foundations, etc. 'Unbought scientific opinion is increasingly hard to find.'

John le Carré
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 Carré