Top 208 Quotes & Sayings by John le Carre - Page 3

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous.

After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.

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.

As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.

Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

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

It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.

Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were volcanoes.

Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.

I think that all writers feel alienated. ... I know that I do. ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated.

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

The greatest threat to mankind comes from the renunciation of individual scruple in favor of institutional denominators. . . . Real heroism lies, as it always will, not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage. Which, come to think of it, is what we used to admire in our Christian savior

Everyone who is not happy must be shot.

Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.

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

If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.

Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.

Love means having something to betray.

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.

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

All men are born free: just not for long.

Most of us live in a condition of secrecy: secret desires, secret appetites, secret hatreds and relationship with the institutions which is extremely intense and uncomfortable. These are, to me, a part of the ordinary human condition. So I don't think I'm writing about abnormal things. ... Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.

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.

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.

...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.

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

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

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

When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.

Life was to be a search, or nothing! But it was the fear that it was nothing that drove me forward. Every encounter was an encounter with myself.

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.

When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.

Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.

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

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

Let's die of it before we're too old.

I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no-one else can make them.

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.

When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.

I can't think of anybody worse to live with.

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.

Why did I desert Labour? Total bloody disillusionment. The party was a corpse. It had no ideology, it became detached, old, spineless and needed to go.

It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?

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

[My novels] introduce levels of intelligence ... moral doubt [and] self-doubt, which may not pertain [to real-world espionage].

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.

Home's where you go when you run out of homes.

The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God.

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

He has the gift of quiet.

I move my lips when I read -- I'm painfully slow -- so I like really good English.

A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.

I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.

To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul. German is such a language. Once you have it in your head, you can go there anytime, you can close the door, you have a refuge.

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.

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. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of The Wind in the Willows, which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital.

Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishounorable 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.