John le Carré Quotes

The greatest crime is to do nothing because we can only do a little (...) I feel nothing, because feeling is subversive and contrary to military discipline. Therefore I do not feel, but I fight and therefore I exist. (part I, chapter 10)

It was the other music that he was hearing: the feeling that, while she was telling him one story, he was listening to a different one, and so was she.

Why is it that so many men of small stature have more courage than men of size?

But so many men learnt strength during the war, learnt terrible things, and put aside their knowledge with a shudder when it ended.

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

What would it be like really and absolutely to believe? (...) To know, really and absolutely know, that there's a Divine Being not set in time or space who reads your thoughts better than you ever did, and probably before you even have them? To believe that God sends you to war, God bends the path of bullets, decides which of his children will die, or have their legs blown off, or make a few hundred million on Wall Street, depending on today's Grand Design? (ch. 14)

There are some Arabs who think that the Germans did the right thing by the Jews. This makes it easy to recruit Arab terrorist.

"It dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle-age without ever being young, and that he was, in the nicest possible way, "on the shelf"."

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.

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

Yes, dear Father. But has it ever occurred to you that by controlling [your feelings] you destroy them? How many times can we say sorry before we don't feel sorry anymore?

"It is not fashionable to quote Stalin but he said once, "half a million liquidated is a statistic, and one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy.

We were both hybrids: I by birth, he by education. We had both taken too many steps away from the country that had borne us to belong anywhere with ease.

"This is a war," Lemas replied. "It's graphic and unpleasant because it's fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it's nothing, nothing at all besides other wars - the last or the next."

George, you won,' said Guillam, as they walked slowly towards the car.

'Did I?' said Smiley. 'Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did.