A committee is an animal with four back legs.

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

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day. Because they have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.

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

George Smiley: [quoting an old letter from Bill Haydon about Jim Prideaux] He has that heavy quiet that commands. He's my other half. Between us we'd make one marvelous man. He asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends, and I'm vastly tickled by the compliment. He's virgin, about eight foot tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge

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