John le Carré > Quotes

“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.”
― John le Carré

“The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”
― John le Carré

“Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.”
― John le Carré, A Perfect Spy

“The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.”
― John le Carré

“I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

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

“There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle no stone will be left standing. ”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous”
― John le Carré

“Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.”
― John le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.”
― John le Carré

“Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes”
― John le Carré

“The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.”
― John le Carré, A Most Wanted Man

“The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story.”
― John le Carré

“Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.”
― John le Carré

“At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? 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, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Tessa distinguished absolutely between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is journalistic pain. It’s diplomatic pain. It’s television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. Those who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it. They were the bad Samaritans.”
― John le Carré, The Constant Gardener

“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

“After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.”
― John le Carré

“Let's die of it before we're too old.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“George Smiley: [quoting an old letter from Bill Haydon about Jim Prideaux] He has that heavy quiet that commands. He's my other half. Between us we'd make one marvelous man. He asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends, and I'm vastly tickled by the compliment. He's virgin, about eight foot tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge”
― John le Carré

“You should have died when I killed you.”
― John le Carré

“Home's where you go when you run out of homes.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

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

“Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“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.”
― John le Carré, Our Kind of Traitor

“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.”
― 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

“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.”
― John le Carré

“No country was ever easier to spy on, Tom, no nation so open-hearted with its secrets, so quick to air them, confide them, or consign them too early to the junk heap of planned American obsolescence. I am too young to know whether there was a time when Americans were able to restrain their admirable passion to communicate, but I doubt it. Certainly the path has been downhill since 1945, for it was quickly apparent that information which ten years ago would have cost Axl's service thousands of dollars in precious hard currency could by the mid-70s be had for a few coppers from the Washington Post. We could have resented this sometimes, if we had smaller natures, for there are few things more vexing in the spy world than landing a scoop for Prague and London one week, only to read the same material in Aviation Weekly the next. But we did not complain. In the great fruit garden of American technology, there were pickings enough for everyone and none of us need ever want for anything again.”
― 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, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Everyone who is not happy must be shot.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Waking and sleeping she had demanded to know where she belonged in a white man's world, and how and where she should invest her ambition and her humanity”
― 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

“It is only when he speaks German, as now, that he allows himself to lament the enslavement of the world's downtrodden classes. "We cannot live in a bubble, Mr. Mundy. Comfortable ignorance is not a solution. In German student societies that I was not permitted to join, they made a toast: 'Better to be a salamander, and live in the fire.”
― John le Carré

“The crowd is bobbing round him and he is part of it, the free people of the earth have taken him among them. He is one with all these grown-up happy children celebrating their independence of things that never held them.”
― John le Carré

“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.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“He has his chin on his chest and his eyes down. He is thinking of his new baby, his new novel, tomorrow's dance contest. He is thinking of everything except what he is thinking about. ”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“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, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“All men are born free: just not for long.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

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

“I've studied the disease, I've lived in the swamp. It is my informed conclusion that we are suffering, as an ex-great nation, from top-down corporate rot. And that's not just the judgement of an ailing old fart. A lot of people in my Service make a profession of not seeing things in black and white. Do not confuse me with them. I'm a late-onset, red-toothed radical with balls. Still with me?”
― John le Carré, Our Kind of Traitor

“Haydon had found his charm again. He could do that at the drop of a hat. He drew you and he repelled you. I remember that exactly. He danced all ways for you, playing your emotions against each other because he had none of his own.”
― John le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“I honestly do wonder, without wishing to be morbid, how I reached this present pass. So far as I can ever remember of my youth, I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest toward my... goal... Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole of life in terms of conspiracy... These people terrify me, but I am one of them. If they stab me in the back, then at least that is the judgement of my peers.”
― John le Carré

“Middle children weep longer than their brothers and sisters. Over her mother’s shoulder, stilling her pains and her injured pride, Jackie Lacon watched the party leave. First, two men she had not seen before: one tall, one short and dark. They drove off in a small green van. No one waved to them, she noticed, or even said goodbye. Next, her father left in his own car; lastly a blond, good-looking man and a short fat one in an enormous overcoat like a pony blanket made their way to a sports car parked under the beech trees. For a moment she really thought there must be something wrong with the fat one, he followed so slowly and so painfully. Then, seeing the handsome man hold the car door for him, he seemed to wake, and hurried forward with a lumpy skip. Unaccountably, this gesture upset her afresh. A storm of sorrow seized her and her mother could not console her.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“You're history, Donohue. You think countries run the fucking world! Go back to fucking Sunday school. It's 'God save our multinational' they're singing these days.”
― John le Carré, The Constant Gardener