John le Carre famous quotes

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.
-- John le Carre

#Inspirational #Leadership #Reality

The only reward for love is the experience of loving.
-- John le Carre

#Love #Dream #Love Is

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
-- John le Carre

#Spy #Population #Literature

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
-- John le Carre

#War #Literature #Shade

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
-- John le Carre

#Movie #Reading #Book

Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
-- John le Carre

#Love #Betrayal #Betrayed

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the ***** and angels of our striving selves.
-- John le Carre

#Angel #Heart #Self

Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.
-- John le Carre

#News #Literature #Secrecy

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.
-- John le Carre

#Writing #Cat #Stories

He has the gift of quiet.
-- John le Carre

#Quiet

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.
-- John le Carre

#Cowboy #Thinking #Play

When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.
-- John le Carre

#Ignorance #Experts #World

For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.
-- John le Carre

#Spy #World #Couches

It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
-- John le Carre

#Luck #Forget #Easy

God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow.
-- John le Carre

#Night #Heaven #Wow

Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
-- John le Carre

#Survival #Infinite #Capacity

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
-- John le Carre

#Stuff #Too Much #Moments

After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.
-- John le Carre

#Enemy #Looks #Fool

Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.
-- John le Carre

#Children #Mistake #Home

Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.
-- John le Carre

#Jesus #Jesus Christ #Twelve

Look... we're getting to be old men, and we've spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems. I can see through Eastern values just as you can see through our Western ones. Both of us, I am sure, have experienced ad nauseam the technical satisfactions of this wretched war. But now your own side is going to shoot you. Don't you think it's time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?
-- John le Carre

#War #Men #Thinking

A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.
-- John le Carre

#Regret #Men #Over You

It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.
-- John le Carre

#Lonely #Writing #Thinking

But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.
-- John le Carre

#Real #Lying #Thinking

Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
-- John le Carre

#Order #Answers #Our Actions

Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
-- John le Carre

#Not Happy #Shots

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.
-- John le Carre

#Eight #Solitude #Age

I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.
-- John le Carre

#Cat #Compassion #Spy

Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.
-- John le Carre

#Spy #Matter #Habit

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.
-- John le Carre

#Morality #Trouble #Method

To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul. German is such a language. Once you have it in your head, you can go there anytime, you can close the door, you have a refuge.
-- John le Carre

#Doors #Soul #Language

All men are born free: just not for long.
-- John le Carre

#Men #Long #Born

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

#Want

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.
-- John le Carre

#Eye #Volcanoes #Wife

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

#Misery #These Days #Journalist

For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
-- John le Carre

#Political #Conflict #Description

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.
-- John le Carre

#Thinking #Childhood #Balance

You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.
-- John le Carre

#Dirty #Mean #Boys

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.
-- John le Carre

#Maturity #Democracy #Age

The greatest threat to mankind comes from the renunciation of individual scruple in favor of institutional denominators. . . . Real heroism lies, as it always will, not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage. Which, come to think of it, is what we used to admire in our Christian savior
-- John le Carre

#Christian #Real #Lying

I can't think of anybody worse to live with.
-- John le Carre

#Thinking

Most of us live in a condition of secrecy: secret desires, secret appetites, secret hatreds and relationship with the institutions which is extremely intense and uncomfortable. These are, to me, a part of the ordinary human condition. So I don't think I'm writing about abnormal things. ... Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.
-- John le Carre

#Real #Writing #Thinking

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
-- John le Carre

#Dozen #Doing Nothing #Reason

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
-- John le Carre

#Fiction #Subjects

A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.
-- John le Carre

#Sacrifice #Men #Soul

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.
-- John le Carre

#Baby #Book #Littles

We've had enough." He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. "We've had a bellyful, in fact." "And like everyone who's had enough," said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, "he wants more.
-- John le Carre

#Facts #Enough Said #Want

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

#Philosophical #Thinking #People

If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
-- John le Carre

#Laughing #World

...in the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery...
-- John le Carre

#Hands #Design #Misery

Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
-- John le Carre

#Punishment #Skins #London

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
-- John le Carre

#Lonely #Vanity #People

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

#Spy

Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.
-- John le Carre

#Loyalty #Liars #Gentleman

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
-- John le Carre

#Book #Men #Hands

I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
-- John le Carre

#Thinking #Bankers #Get Away