John le Carré Quotes

93 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
[Intelligence] brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret. All the rest of it — intervention, destabilization, assassination, all that junk — is in my view not only anticonstitutional but unproductive and silly. You can never foresee the consequences.

John le Carré
All of a sudden everything was up for grabs. It was extremely comic that the uninformed were saying that spying is over, hence le Carré is over. 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 Carré
Every writer wants to be believed. But every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

John le Carré
When I began writing. I was what was politely called "a foreign servant". I went to my employers and said that I'd written my first novel. They read it and said they had no objections, but even if it were about butterflies, they said, I would have to choose a pseudonym.

John le Carré
It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity.

John le Carré
When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.

John le Carré
If you meddle in people's affairs, you then have to live with the consequences. Look at Afghanistan. We recruited the Muslim extremist movement to assist us in the fight against Russia, and we let loose a demon.

John le Carré
Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.

John le Carré
Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.

John le Carré
Anybody in the creative business, as you might call it, has some sense of guilt about fooling around with fact, that you're committing larceny, that all of life is material for your fabulations.

John le Carré
The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.

John le Carré
What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?

John le Carré
No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn.

John le Carré
We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.

John le Carré
I am sure that the best intelligence services must still be Israel's. They've made awful mistakes, as intelligence services will, but that's because Mossad and Shin Bet are splendidly motivated. If Israel loses a battle, it loses the war; if it loses the war, it loses its country.

John le Carré
There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle no stone will be left standing.

John le Carré
Nothing in life... even a few broken bones, is without its reward.

John le Carré
Balls, the lot of it. It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.

John le Carré
The process is empathy, fear and dramatization. I have to put him into conflict with something, and that conflict usually comes from within. They're usually people who are torn in some way between personal and institutional loyalty.

John le Carré
I think what gives my works whatever universality they have is that they use the metaphysical secret world to describe some realities of the overt world.

John le Carré
I was receiving the sort of attention writers dream of. My only problem was, I didn't believe my own publicity.

John le Carré
What have I learned over the last 50 years? Come to think of it, not much. Just that the morals of the secret world are very like our own.

John le Carré
I realised that now and forever more I was to be branded as the spy turned writer, rather than as a writer who, like scores of his kind, had done a stint in the secret world, and written about it.

John le Carré
Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.

John le Carré