John le Carré - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)

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

John le Carré
How far can we go in the rightful defence of our western values, without abandoning them along the way? My fictional chief of the British Service — I called him Control — had no doubt of the answer: "I mean, you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?"

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
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
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
"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
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