John le Carré Quotes

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

But gossip must see its characters
in black and white, equip them with
sins and motives easily conveyed in
the shorthand of conversation.

It was from us they learnt the secret of life: that we grow old without growing wise. They realised that nothing happened when we grew up: no blinding light on the road to Damascus, no sudden feeling of maturity.

Power sits uneasily on those one has grown up with. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Spy.

It is said that men condemned to death are subject to sudden moments of elation; as if, like moths in the fire, their destruction were coincidental with attainment.

I don't know, Cardew replied evenly. And when I don't know, I usually keep quiet.

And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackens, that his life had consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order, and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it.

He would set up as a mild eccentric, discursive, withdrawn, but possessing one or two lovable habits such as muttering to himself as he bumbled along pavements. Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. 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.

He possessed, however, that persistent inquisitiveness which for journalists and lawyers is an end in itself.

Those critics don’t read their own newspapers, and nor perhaps have they noticed that a former head of MI5, our security service, who was translated to the House of Lords, was recently denied the senior post on a security committee on account of her connections with oligarchs in the Ukraine... supposedly connected with criminal conspiracy.

We colonise them, Your Graces, we corrupt them, we exploit them, we bomb them, sack their cities, ignore their culture, and confound them with the infinite variety of our religious sects. We are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils as well — the stink of the round-eye is abhorrent to them and we’re too thick even to know it. Yet when we have done our worst, and more than our worst, my sons, we have barely scratched the surface of the Asian smile.” Other

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 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.

When people ask me whether I am a spy –‘are you now, or have you ever been?’ –I am tempted to reply with a hearty –‘Yes, and since the age of five.’ For a state of watchfulness must surely be the first requisite of a writer, as it is of a secret agent. A writer, like a spy, must prey upon his neighbours; like a spy he is dependent on those whom he deceives; like a spy he must somehow contrive to keep a distance from his own feelings and by doing so conjure up a package that will meet with the approval of his masters. Like a spy, he is not merely an outsider, but implicitly a subversive..

Smiley was not opposed to social distinctions but he liked to make his own.