John le Carre Quotes - Page 4

The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God.

Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch.

All men are born free: just not for long.

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 information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.

Love means having something to betray.

To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul. German is such a language. Once you have it in your head, you can go there anytime, you can close the door, you have a refuge.

Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were volcanoes.

If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.

Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.

When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.

As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.

It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?

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?

What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.

He has the gift of quiet.

Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.

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 which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.