John le Carre Quotes

127 quotes in 1706 categories

• Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
• A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.
• It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away…
• 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…
• But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or…
• My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.
• History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence.…
• A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
• A committee is an animal with four back legs.
• The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will…
• The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a…
• Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.
• During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
• Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
• Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.
• Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
• In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to…
• America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.
• But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
• By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.

Browse John le Carre Quotes by Category