John le Carré Quotes

You could be the perfect spy. All you need is a cause.

He was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment.

A man who lives apart, not to others but alone, is exposed to obvious psychological dangers. 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.

He became a solitary, belonging to that tragic class of active men prematurely deprived of activity; swimmers barred from the water or actors banished from the stage.

"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"."

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.

He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man

Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch.

Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.

Look, we are getting to be old men, and we've spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems... Don't you think it's time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?

Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they're making a fantasy about themselves.

society is unconcerned with the aftermath of sensation.

Why am I despising you when I'm about to change your life?

Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishenss or indifference. Woodrew knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not.

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