John le Carré Quotes

“For five years the refugees of Eastern Europe had been pouring into Austria through every fast-closing gap in the barbed wire: crashing frontiers in stolen cars and lorries, across minefields, clinging to the underneath of trains, to be corralled and questioned and decided over in their thousands, while they played chess on wooden packing cases and showed each other photographs of people they would never see again. They came from Hungary and Romania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and sometimes Russia, and they hoped they were on their way to Canada and Australia and Palestine. They had travelled by devious routes and often for devious reasons. They were doctors and scientists and bricklayers. They were truck drivers, thieves, acrobats, publishers, rapists and architects.”
― Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography

“We all reinvent our pasts, but writers are in a class of their own,”
― Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography

“In 1989 an American invasion, Operation Just Cause, had ousted the government of President Manuel Noriega. ‘They got rid of Ali Baba but they forgot the forty thieves,’ ran a popular joke in Panama.”
― Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography

“I cannot get used to the dispassion with which wealthy Greeks contemplate their impoverished compatriots;”
― Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography

“She had typed A Murder of Quality under protest, but this time she declined, so David had to rely on the Embassy secretaries instead. In a letter to Ann written in June, he complained that ‘the new book drags along but the girls are all away and there’s no one to type it’.35”
― Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography

“first sight the new master looks quite innocuous, with a mop of corn-coloured hair and a soft, hesitant, slightly insinuating voice as though he means you to read between the lines of what he is saying. But from the beginning of the first lesson he is in control, apparently without making the slightest effort to exert authority. He switches on charm or menace at will and when the yobs at the back start to make trouble he delivers merciless and exact parodies of their arrogant, languid voices. For me David Cornwell also has the marvellous freshness of a born teacher who is teaching his subject for the first time . . .11”
― Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography

“spiv.”
― Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography

“His standards for himself, and for everybody around him, are the highest. He was Foreign Office trained and wants the world to function at that level. He is meticulous about everything; he hates to be late; he hates inaccuracy; he double checks everything; he follows up everything; he has fallbacks if things should, in spite of everybody’s efforts, go wrong.7”
― Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography