John le Carré Quotes

93 Sourced Quotes

For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.

John le Carré
It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters.

John le Carré
I'm a morning person. I like to drink in the evening, go to sleep on a good idea and wake up with the idea solved or advanced. I believe in sleep.

John le Carré
The merit of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, then — or its offence, depending where you stood — was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible.

John le Carré
In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery...

John le Carré
In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.

John le Carré
For the last few years I have lived only in the deep country. I've always kept away from writers and the literary set. I'd much rather talk to the woodcutter than a fellow writer. I like the primary material. I don't like exchanging ideas much. I don't like talking about my work, believe it or not. I'm a total bore, actually.

John le Carré
To operate an intelligence network against the Islamist terror is terribly difficult because they don't have a central command and control center such as we would understand. Therefore you cannot penetrate at the top and find out what will happen on the ground.

John le Carré
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 Carré
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 Carré
The disciplines of storytelling require that I shape, out of the monotony and everyday life of espionage, something that has a beginning, a middle and an end. That's already contrary to the reality.

John le Carré
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 Carré
Savages... are by nature rash. They have no middle gear. The middle gear of any man is self-discipline.

John le Carré
I never wanted to write about Smiley again. I felt it was done, and I don't like writing through an old man's eyes. You know, the older you get, the younger you want to be.

John le Carré
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 Carré
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 rights and wrongs?

John le Carré
As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.

John le Carré
There are some Arabs who think that the Germans did the right thing by the Jews. This makes it easy to recruit Arab terrorist.

John le Carré
There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo.

John le Carré
I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.

John le Carré
Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.

John le Carré
A committee is an animal with four back legs.

John le Carré
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 Carré
If I had to put a name to it, I would wish that all my books were entertainments. I think the first thing you've got to do is grab the reader by the ear, and make him sit down and listen. Make him laugh, make him feel. We all want to be entertained at a very high level.

John le Carré
'The cat sat on the mat' is not a story. 'The cat sat on the dog's mat' is a story.

John le Carré
I would give to a composite writer all the virtues I have not got, but the trouble is, I am not sure he would be able to write. I would give him clarity of vision, independence of public acclaim, the early experience of happy heterosexual love between two good parents, and a voracious appetite for other people's writing. Then I would fall asleep.

John le Carré
America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

John le Carré
We lie to one another every day, in the sweetest way, often unconsciously. We dress ourselves and compose ourselves in order to present ourselves to one another.

John le Carré
I think I was born with two — for a writer — lucky skills. One is a very good ear for voice and also a very retentive ear, so that I can recall both accent and words for a long time afterwards. And the other is a wary retention of certain detail-topography, rooms, furniture and so on.

John le Carré
In the war on terror we did everything wrong that we could have done.

John le Carré