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

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

For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.

People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem.

Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.

Look... we're getting to be old men, and we've spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems. I can see through Eastern values just as you can see through our Western ones. Both of us, I am sure, have experienced ad nauseam the technical satisfactions of this wretched war. But now your own side is going to shoot you. Don't you think it's time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?

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