John le Carre Quotes

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

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.

When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.

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

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

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.

The only reward for love is the experience of loving.

There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.

I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.

Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are.

Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

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.

Blackmail is more effective than bribery.

Multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world's sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders.

When it comes to recruiting people for the secret world, what the recruiters are looking for is pretty much what I had. I was unanchored, looking for an institution to look after me. I had a bit of larceny. I understood larceny. I understood the natural criminality in people - because it was - it was all around me. And I have no doubt there was a chunk of it inside me too. Once I found that identity, it took root in me. It exactly - it gelled with the world that I'd known in the past.

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

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

People are very secretive - secret even from themselves.

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

Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.