John le Carre Quotes

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.

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.

Blackmail is more effective than bribery.

It was a charming fantasy of romantics that the spies would stop spying, that political conflict would end and politicians would tell the truth. Unfortunately that has not been the case.

People are very secretive - secret even from themselves.

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.

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

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.

All power corrupts but some must govern.

I can't think of anybody worse to live with.

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.

I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.

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.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak. What I see in my country, progressively over these years, is that the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. The rich have become indifferent through a philosophy of greed, and the poorer have become hopeless because they're not properly cared for. That's actually something that is happening in many Western societies. Your own, I am told, is not free from it.

The only reward for love is the experience of loving.

America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.

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

There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.

The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.

The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion. Fifty years on, I don't associate the book with anything that ever happened to me, save for one wordless encounter at London airport when a worn-out, middle-aged military kind of man in a stained raincoat slammed a handful of mixed foreign change on to the bar and in gritty Irish accents ordered himself as much Scotch as it would buy. In that moment, Alec Leamas was born. Or so my memory, not always a reliable informant, tells me.

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

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.

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.

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

[My novels] introduce levels of intelligence ... moral doubt [and] self-doubt, which may not pertain [to real-world espionage].

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

You can't make war against terror. Terror is a technique of battle. It's a tactic that has been employed since time immemorial. You can conduct clandestine action against terrorists, and that must be done.

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

I move my lips when I read -- I'm painfully slow -- so I like really good English.

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

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.

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

I think that all writers feel alienated. ... I know that I do. ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated.

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

There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo.

To possess another language is to possess another soul.

The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom; to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy.

I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.

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.

Those who are not with Mr. Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall -- just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.

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

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.

Love means having something to betray.

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

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.

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