John Le Carre Quotes & Sayings

God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow. — John Le Carre

It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can. — John Le Carre

Hotel's full up, I'm afraid, Mr. Roper, Jonathan rehearsed in another last-ditch effort to fend off the inevitable. Herr Meister is desolated. A temporary clerk has made an unpardonable error. However, we have managed to obtain rooms for you at the Baur au Lac, et cetera. — John Le Carre

Smiley was the oddest. You thought, to look at him, that he couldn't cross the road alone, but you might as well have offered protection to a hedgehog. — John Le Carre

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby. — John Le Carre

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

Ashe, Kiever, Peters; that was a progression in quality, in authority, which to Leamas was axiomatic of the hierarchy of an intelligence network. It was also, he suspected, a progression in ideology. Ashe, the mercenary, Kiever the fellow traveler, and now Peters, for whom the end and the means were identical. — John Le Carre

Cyril, church warden and lead tenor in the choir, lives with mother, banned from unsupervised contact with schoolchildren; Harold, drunk dentist, early retirement, pretty thatched cottage off the Bodmin road, one son in rehab, wife in the bin. — John Le Carre

People are very secretive - secret even from themselves. — John Le Carre

Without a pen in my hand I can't think. — John Le Carre

In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even show passes to go in and out of the building. — John Le Carre

People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem. — John Le Carre

Shane was horrid to her, always sneering at her because she was honest and simple about the things she liked. Shane hated Stella - I think it was because Stella didn't want to be a lady of quality. She was quite happy to be herself. That's what really worried Shane. Shane likes people to compete so that she can make fools of them. — John Le Carre

There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed. — John Le Carre

Writing doesn't get easier. Every novel is a first novel. — John Le Carre

Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book. — John Le Carre

In Lacon's world, direct questions were the height of bad taste, but direct answers were worse. — John Le Carre

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) — John Le Carre

The pharmaceutical corporations are engaged in the systematic corruption of the medical profession, country by country — John Le Carre

Let us honour if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one. Or — John Le Carre

The driver was holding open the rear door. He was young and blond, a boy in his prime. — John Le Carre

Spying is waiting. — John Le Carre

It is only when he speaks German, as now, that he allows himself to lament the enslavement of the world's downtrodden classes. We cannot live in a bubble, Mr. Mundy. Comfortable ignorance is not a solution. In German student societies that I was not permitted to join, they made a toast: 'Better to be a salamander, and live in the fire. — John Le Carre

There is no reward for love except the experience of loving, and nothing to be learned by it except humility. — John Le Carre

By the by, he is a virgin, about eight feet tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge. Do not be alarmed. — John Le Carre

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

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

Even his Englishness was a well-kept secret. — John Le Carre

I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now i wish i could distinguish them. — John Le Carre

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. — John Le Carre

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

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

It was the skinny boy's stillness, he decided later. Those lines of age in a face as young as mine. His look of winter on a lovely spring day. — John Le Carre

There was only now [ ... ] There was no tomorrow because tomorrow was the excuse. There was now or there was nowhere. — John Le Carre

The good pupils are often brilliant, and they keep you on your toes and take you to the limits of your knowledge. The worst pupils provide a unique insight into the criminal mind. — John Le Carre

Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman. Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me. — John Le Carre

The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one. — John Le Carre

I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering. — John Le Carre

Why are Scots so attracted to the secret world? Smiley wondered, not for the first time in his career. Ships' engineers, Colonial administrators, spies. . . . Their heretical Scottish history drew them to distant churches, he decided. "George! — John Le Carre

The embassy's front door was of bulletproof steel lined with a veneer of English oak. You attained it by touching a button in a silent lift. The royal crest, in this air-conditioned stillness, suggested silicone and funeral parlours. The windows, like the doors, had been toughened to frustrate the Irish and tinted to frustrate the sun. Not a whisper of the real world penetrated. The silent traffic, cranes, shipping, old town and new town, the brigade of women in orange tunics gathering leaves along the central reservation of the Avenida Balboa, were mere specimens in Her Majesty's inspection chamber. From the moment you set foot in British extraterritorial airspace, you were looking in, not out. - — John Le Carre

Haydon had found his charm again. He could do that at the drop of a hat. He drew you and he repelled you. I remember that exactly. He danced all ways for you, playing your emotions against each other because he had none of his own. — John Le Carre

In moments of crisis our thoughts do not run consecutively but rather sweep over us in waves or intuition and experience ... — John Le Carre

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed. — John Le Carre

one of those world builders who do othing but destroy, — John Le Carre

There was an ITV television production of the second novel I wrote, called 'Murder of Quality.' It was a little murder story set in a public school - I'd once taught at Eton, and I used that stuff. — John Le Carre

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

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

By what route the infant Hansen found his way to the Jesuits, the file did not relate. Perhaps the mother converted. Those were dark years still, and if expediency required it, she may have swallowed her Protestant convictions to buy the boy a decent education. Give the Jesuits his soul, she may have reasoned, and they will give him a brain. Or perhaps she sensed in her son from early on the mercurial nature that later ruled his life, and she determined to subordinate him to a stronger religious discipline than was offered by the easy-going Protestants. If so, she was wise. — John Le Carre

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of 'The Wind in the Willows,' which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital. — John Le Carre

It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day. — John Le Carre

Some fieldmen, and particularly the clever ones, take a perverse pride in not knowing the whole picture. Their art consists in the deft handling of loose ends, and stops there stubbornly. — John Le Carre

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes — John Le Carre

Perhaps we didn't win anyway. (the Cold War) Perhaps they just lost. Or perhaps, without the bonds of ideological conflict to restrain us any more, our troubles are just beginning. — John Le Carre

We're all a bunch of no-good apostates and blasphemers and murderers and fornicators and God-haters, so fuck the lot of us. For those guys, and all the guys we'd like to meet who share their perceptions, it's the Western hemisphere versus Islam, and no stops between. — John Le Carre

I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton — John Le Carre

The row of villas which lines Western Avenue is like a row of pink graves in a field of grey; an architectural image of middle age. Their uniformity is the discipline of growing old, of dying without violence and living without success. They are houses which have got the better of their occupants, whom they change at will, and do not change themselves. Furniture vans glide respectfully among them like hearses, discreetly removing the dead and introducing the living. Now and then some tenant will raise his hand, expending pots of paint on the woodwork or labour on the garden, but his efforts no more alter the house than flowers a hospital ward, and the grass will grow its own way, like grass on a grave. — John Le Carre

Most of all he asked about their philosophy. To Leamas that was the most difficult question of all. 'What do you mean, a philosophy?' he replied. 'We're not Marxists, we're nothing. Just people.' 'Are you Christians, then?' 'Not many, I shouldn't think. I don't know many.' 'What makes them do it, then?' Fiedler persisted. 'They must have a philosophy.' 'Why must they? Perhaps they don't know, don't even care. Not everyone has a philosophy,' Leamas answered, a little helplessly. — John Le Carre

The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God, — John Le Carre

Some problems - take Ireland - were insoluble, but you would never get the Americans to admit anything was insoluble. — John Le Carre

They loved each other and believed they loved mankind, they fought each other and believed they fought the world. — John Le Carre

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. — John Le Carre

The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started. — John Le Carre

No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn. — John Le Carre

His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were. — John Le Carre

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. — John Le Carre

Dieter had a theory that was pure Faust. Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective. He used to say that the greatest mistake man ever made was to distinguish between the mind and the body: an order does not exist if it is not obeyed. — John Le Carre

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

In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job. — John Le Carre

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Theatrical Trailer (Courtesy of Focus — John Le Carre

You just happened to put your hand to your face and find it damp and you wondered what the hell Christ bothered to die for, if He ever died at all. — John Le Carre

A terrorist for Karen is someone who has a bomb but no aeroplane.
Ch. 4 — John Le Carre

Gossip till the cows come home. — John Le Carre

Why did I desert Labour? Total bloody disillusionment. The party was a corpse. It had no ideology, it became detached, old, spineless and needed to go. — John Le Carre

History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. — John Le Carre

Martindale had no valid claim on Smiley either professionally or socially. He worked on the fleshy side of the Foreign Office and his job consisted of lunching visiting dignitaries whom no one else would have entertained in his woodshed. He was a floating bachelor with a grey mane and that nimbleness which only fat men have. — John Le Carre

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. — John Le Carre

Breath and caught the — John Le Carre

Smiley himself was one of those solitaires who seem to have come into the world fully educated at the age of eighteen. Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country's enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed. Assimilation is his highest aim, he learns to love the crowds who pass him in the street without a glance; he clings to them for his anonimity and his safety. His fear makes him servile - he could embrace the shoppers who jostle him in their impatience, and force him from the pavement. He could adore the officials, the police, the bus conductors, for the terse indifference of their attitudes. (ch. 9) — John Le Carre

We pretend a lot of things aren't there. Or we pretend that other things are more important. That's how we survive. — John Le Carre

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction. — John Le Carre

When you are brought up as a frozen child, you go on freezing. It wasn't until I had my four sons, who have brought me immense joy, that I began to thaw. That I realised how utterly extraordinary my childhood was. — John Le Carre

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 — John Le Carre

You're history, Donohue. You think countries run the fucking world! Go back to fucking Sunday school. It's 'God save our multinational' they're singing these days. — John Le Carre

He looks like a mixture of Humpty-Dumpty and a Cornish elf
very short and broad
and I don't think he's anyone's fool. — John Le Carre

Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism ... when had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom? — John Le Carre

Some men will never be heroes, some heroes will never be men, he thought, with urgent acknowledgements to Joseph Conrad. — John Le Carre

You said they were friends, Mr Worthington. Sometimes third parties become intermediaries in these affairs.' On the word affair, he looked up and found himself staring directly into Peter Worthington's honest, abject eyes: and for a moment the two masks slipped simultaneously. Was Smiley observing? Or was he being observed? — John Le Carre

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

You killed a sentry, you know that?"

"I guessed I had...What do they expect if they mount such a damn stupid operation? Why didn't they pull us both in at once? Why put all the lights out? If anything was over organized, that was."

"I am afraid that as a nation we tend to over organize. Abroad that passes for efficiency. — John Le Carre

You can't eat politics, you can't sell them, and you can't sleep with them,' Drake liked to say. So you might as well make money out of them. — John Le Carre

Everyone who is not happy must be shot. — John Le Carre

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? — John Le Carre

I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies. — John Le Carre

The Party knows more about us than we know ourselves,' the woman replied. — John Le Carre

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. What do you think of i? — John Le Carre

I move my lips when I read
I'm painfully slow
so I like really good English. — John Le Carre

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. — John Le Carre

One more consideration also weighed with Smiley, though in his paper he is too gentlemanly to mention it. A lot of ghosts walked in those post-fall days, and one of them was a fear that, buried somewhere in the Circus, lay Bill Haydon's chosen successor: that Bill had brought him on, recruited and educated him against the very day when he himself, one way or another, would fade from the scene. Sam was originally a Haydon nominee. His later victimisation by Haydon could easily have been a put-up job. Who was to say, in that very jumpy atmosphere, that Sam Collins, manoeuvring for readmission, was not the heir elect to Haydon's treachery?
For all these reasons George Smiley put on his raincoat and got himself out on the street. Willingly, no doubt - for at heart, he was still a case man. Even his detractors gave him that. — John Le Carre

Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence. — John Le Carre

Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it. — John Le Carre