John le Carré Quotes

"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.

She's become a Russian again, he thought. When something works, she's grateful. When it doesn't work, it's life.

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

"Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were volcanoes.

What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs? I’d have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens that they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass that you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me.

A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.

There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle no stone will be left standing.

Don't give it to them all at once, make them work for it. Confuse them with detail, leave things out, go back on your tracks. Be testy, be cussed, be difficult. Drink like a fish; don't give way on the ideology, they won't trust that. They want to deal with a man they've bought; they want the clash of opposites, Alec, not some half-cock convert.

George Smiley: [quoting an old letter from Bill Haydon about Jim Prideaux] He has that heavy quiet that commands. He's my other half. Between us we'd make one marvelous man. He asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends, and I'm vastly tickled by the compliment. He's virgin, about eight foot tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

He knew then what it was that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England; it was the caring about little things - the faith in ordinary life; the simplicity that made you break up a bit of bread into a paper bag, walk down to the beach and throw it to the gulls. It was this respect for triviality which he had never been allowed to possess; whether it was bread of the seagulls or love

We lie to one another every day, in the sweetest way, often unconsciously. We dress ourselves and compose ourselves in order to present ourselves to one another.

Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.

She had the experience to suffer with discretion.

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