Carre O Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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