John Le Carre Quotes

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

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

The only reward for love is the experience of loving.

Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are.

I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.

I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.

Blackmail is more effective than bribery.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.

Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.

I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton

There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

People are very secretive - secret even from themselves.

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.

Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.

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

People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.

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

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.

Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.

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

The pharmaceutical corporations are engaged in the systematic corruption of the medical profession, country by country

Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

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

But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

He has the gift of quiet.

I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.

For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.

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

I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.

The good pupils are often brilliant, and they keep you on your toes and take you to the limits of your knowledge. The worst pupils provide a unique insight into the criminal mind.

I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.

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.

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

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.

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

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

When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.

Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.

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