Carre Quotes & Sayings

Intelligence work has one moral law - it is justified by results. — 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

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. — John Le Carre

There is no one better than a good Englishman and no one worse than a bad one. I have observed you. I think you are a good one. Mr Pine, do you know Richard Roper? — John Le Carre

There were times when he confronted his own image as a man confronts an empty valley, and the vision propelled him forward again to experience as despair compels us to extinction. Sometimes he was like a man in flight, but running toward the enemy, desperate to feel upon his vanishing body the blows that would prove his being; desperate to imprint upon his sad conformity the mark of real purpose, desperate perhaps, as Leclerc had hinted, to abdicate his conscience in order to discover God. — John Le Carre

Western teaching institutions that refuse to acknowledge today's taboos are by definition subversive. Tell the new zealots of Washington that in the making of Israel a monstrous human crime was committed and they will call you an anti-Semite. Tell them there was no Garden of Creation and they will call you a dangerous cynic. Tell them God is what man invented to compensate for his ignorance of science and they will call you a Communist. — John Le Carre

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

The merit of 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,' then - or its offence, depending where you stood - was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible. — John Le Carre

The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal. — John Le Carre

Middle children weep longer than their brothers and sisters. Over her mother's shoulder, stilling her pains and her injured pride, Jackie Lacon watched the party leave. First, two men she had not seen before: one tall, one short and dark. They drove off in a small green van. No one waved to them, she noticed, or even said goodbye. Next, her father left in his own car; lastly a blond, good-looking man and a short fat one in an enormous overcoat like a pony blanket made their way to a sports car parked under the beech trees. For a moment she really thought there must be something wrong with the fat one, he followed so slowly and so painfully. Then, seeing the handsome man hold the car door for him, he seemed to wake, and hurried forward with a lumpy skip. Unaccountably, this gesture upset her afresh. A storm of sorrow seized her and her mother could not console her. — John Le Carre

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

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

Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history. — John Le Carre

I can't think of anybody worse to live with. — John Le Carre

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

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

I've always had difficulties with female characters. — John Le Carre

The crowd is bobbing round him and he is part of it, the free people of the earth have taken him among them. He is one with all these grown-up happy children celebrating their independence of things that never held them. — John Le Carre

George, you won,' said Guillam, as they walked slowly towards the car.
'Did I?' said Smiley. 'Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did. — John Le Carre

Can't you see it's the same? The same guns, the same children dying in the streets? Only the dream has changed, the blood is the same colour. Is that what you want? — John Le Carre

[Smiley contemplates graffiti:]'Punk is destructive. Society does not need it.' The assertion caused him a moment's indecision. 'Oh, but society does,' he wanted to reply; 'society is an association of minorities. — John Le Carre

My doctor felt that the main contributing factor was so many years of malnutrition, especially during my formative years, even before I got into modeling. — Carre Otis

Demos are mock battles, never the real thing. Everybody knows where they're going to happen, and when and why. Nobody gets seriously hurt. Well, not unless they ask for it. (ch. 4) — John Le Carre

Spying is waiting. — John Le Carre

Some people are agents from birth, Monsignors
he told them
appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first, Your Eminences: 'Whether it's us, whether it's the opposition, or whether it's the bloody missionaries. — 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

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

What that judge did is immoral. Here in Panama when we bribe somebody we expect loyalty. — John Le Carre

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

The monstrosity of this, reaching Smiley through a thickening wall of spiritual exhaustion, left him momentarily speechless. — John Le Carre

Afterwards Smiley always thought of that interview as a fan dance; a calculated progression of disclosures, each revealing different parts of a mysterious entity. Finally Steed-Asprey, who seemed to be Chairman, removed the last veil, and the truth stood before him in all its dazzling nakedness. He was being offered a post in what, for want of a better name, Steed-Asprey blushingly described as the Secret Service. — John Le Carre

The Soviet Knight is dying inside his armour. He is a secondary power like you British. He can start a war but cannot continue one and cannot win one. Believe me. — John Le Carre

I am so sick of theory Teddy," says Sasha as his movement and ideals collapse. "I am ready to give up half of what I believe in exchange for one clarifying vision. To see one great rational truth glowing on the horizon, to go to it regardless of the cost, regardless of what must be left behind, is what I dream of beyond all things. Will tomorrow change me? Nothing changes me. It is only the world that changes. — John Le Carre

Many women who have anorexia put their hearts in a compromised situation. — Carre Otis

If you're growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended back. — John Le Carre

Waking and sleeping she had demanded to know where she belonged in a white man's world, and how and where she should invest her ambition and her humanity — John Le Carre

That one won't crack, though, Mendel decided with approval; one of your flabby oak trees, Smiley was. Think you could blow him over with one puff, but when it comes to the storm he's the only one left standing at the end of it. — 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

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

His intuition was luminous from the instant you met him. So was his intelligence. A lot of actors act intelligent, but Philip was the real thing: a shining, artistic polymath with an intelligence that came at you like a pair of headlights and enveloped you from the moment he grabbed your hand, put a huge arm round your neck and shoved a cheek against yours; or if the mood took him, hugged you to him like a big, pudgy schoolboy, then stood and beamed at you while he took stock of the effect. (About Philip Seymour Hoffman) — John Le Carre

My parents were both from the East and had moved to San Francisco only so my father could go to law school there. — Carre Otis

I think I'm in the same mood as ever, but in some ways more mature. I guess you could say that, at 65, when you've seen the world shape up as I have, there are only two things you can do: laugh or kill yourself. — John Le Carre

Writers are two-home men - they want a place outside and a place within. — John Le Carre

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. — 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

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

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead. — John Le Carre

Gossip till the cows come home. — John Le Carre

In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery ... — John Le Carre

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

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

Surely Calvary represents a fearful price. But your soul and mine, and the millions thus far redeemed and other millions which may yet be redeemed, a wrecked earth restored back to Eden perfection, the kingdoms of this world wrested from the grasp of the usurper and delivered over to the reign of their rightful King! - when we shall see all this shall we not gladly say, "Behold the purchase? — E.G. Carre

Yes, dear Father. But has it ever occurred to you that by controlling [your feelings] you destroy them? How many times can we say sorry before we don't feel sorry anymore? — 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

In the past, I often found that when I reached out for a fast cure it led me down a slippery slope of more medications, hopeful dependence on the next prescription and ultimately a much longer drawn-out illness. — Carre Otis

I took the first James Kelman novel, 'The Bus Conductor Hines', home to my dad. I thought, 'My dad will like this; it's written in Scots.' But my dad said: 'I can't read that.' He was reading James Bond and John le Carre. That was part of what attracted me to crime - the idea of getting a wide audience. — Ian Rankin

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

What you get in the Cold War is 'the wilderness of mirrors' where you have to figure out what's good and what's evil. That's good for John le Carre, but not me. — Alan Furst

One sacrificed for many. It's not pretty, I know, choosing who it'll be
turning the plan into people. — John Le Carre

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen. — John Le Carre

Life was to be a search, or nothing! But it was the fear that it was nothing that drove me forward. Every encounter was an encounter with myself. — John Le Carre

Forgive me. Sometimes an answer can vary with a context, if you follow me — John Le Carre

He has a saying: he'll only believe what can be written on a postcard. — John Le Carre

It was his shoes, he noticed to his pleasure, that she most objected to; and he thought: bloody good, that's what shoes are for. — 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

If a decade of diplomatic life had taught Toby one thing, it was to treat every crisis as normal and soluble. — John Le Carre

what is conviction? How do we identify it? How can we know that we should be guided by it? Is it to be found in the heart, or in the intellect? And what if it is only to be found in the one and not the other? — John Le Carre

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves. — John Le Carre

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. — John Le Carre

He had the nerve not to drink in a University where you proved your manhood by being drunk most of your first year. — John Le Carre

Dash it all, she's an actress! Don't take her so seriously. Actors don't have opinions, my dear chap, still less do actresses. They have moods. Fads. Poses. Twenty-four-hour passions. There's a lot wrong with the world, dammit. Actors are absolute suckers for dramatic solutions. For all I know, by the time you get her out there, she'll be Born Again! — John Le Carre

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

The ground on which you once stood is cut away. You have become a citizen of No Man's Land. I send you my greetings.
the closing lines of Smiley's letter to Karla persuading him to defect. — John Le Carre

They would know that inconsistency in human decision can make nonsense of the best-planned espionage approach; that 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

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

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

All right, Pendel had lied to him, if lying was the word. He had told Osnard what he wanted to hear and gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain it for him, including making it up. Some people lied because lying gave them a kick, made them feel braver or cleverer than all the lowly conformists who went on their bellies and told the truth. Not Pendel. Pendel lied to conform. To say the right things at all times, even if the right things were in one place, and the truth was in another. — John Le Carre

I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other's frotiers, we are the no-men of this no-man's land. — John Le Carre

You give the air of looking for someone, Sophie had said. But I think the missing person is yourself. Each — John Le Carre

Sometimes you do it to save face, thought Jerry, other times you just do it because you haven't done your job unless you've scared yourself to death. Other times again, you go in order to remind yourself that survival is a fluke. But mostly you go because the others go; for machismo; and because in order to belong you must share. — John Le Carre

Right ... What do you do for a living, Smiley?" "After the war I was at Oxford for a bit. Teaching and research. I'm in London now." "One of those clever coves, eh? — John Le Carre

But I would assert that despite the wide variety of yoga options and individual preferences, there is one universal element: the union of consciousness and movement, breath and awareness. — Carre Otis

I just read about John Le Carre, the great spy novelist. He had an absolutely miserable childhood. His mother deserted him when he was young. His father was a playboy and a drunk. He was shifted around to many different homes. He knew he was a writer when he was about nine, but he was dyslexic. So here was a person with an absolutely messed-up childhood and a symptom that prevented him from doing what he wanted to do most. Yet that very symptom was part of the calling. It forced him to go deeper. — James Hillman

Breath and caught the — John Le Carre

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

I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name. — John Le Carre

When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt. — John Le Carre

Page 112 The Honorable Schoolboy
He was attended this morning by his wife, a former Bible School teacher from Borneo, a dried- out shrew in bobbed hair and ankle socks who could spot a sin before it was committed. — John Le Carre

He's going to save the world before he leaves it if it kills him. — John Le Carre

To possess another language is to possess another soul. — 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

Her palm was broad and strong and dry. Its nakedness against his own was like the gift of her entire body. — John Le Carre

Over them, in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note. — John Le Carre

For a long moment, while Brock stood off observing them, Ned and Barley appraised one another as only Englishmen can who are of the same height and class and shape of head. — John Le Carre

Outside the school's walls the Swinging Sixties are in full cry, but inside them the band of Empire plays on. Twice-daily chapel services praise the school's war dead to the detriment of its living, value the white man above lesser breeds, and preach chastity to boys who can find sexual stimulation in a Times editorial. — John Le Carre

In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs. — John Le Carre

I will read anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carre, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker. — Hillary Clinton