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 CarreIn every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.
John le CarreMulti-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world's sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders.
John le CarreDuring the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
John le CarreAmerica has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
John le CarreIt 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