John Le Carre Quotes

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.

It was a charming fantasy of romantics that the spies would stop spying, that political conflict would end and politicians would tell the truth. Unfortunately that has not been the case.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.

I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.

To possess another language is to possess another soul.

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.

It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.

Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.

God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow.

The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received.

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.

On one hand we go like hell for every terror cell we can find, we penetrate it, we destroy it. On the other hand, there is a much bigger need for a political solution.

I mean, you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?

I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.

For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.

I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.

'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.