John le Carré
88 quotes
Biography
"Everyone who is not happy must be shot."
"Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present."
"Where I kick myself is where I think I actually contributed to the myth of the intelligence services being very good."
"In 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, in every confrontation that has come my way, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know."
"Every writer wants to be believed. But every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic."
"I use the furniture of espionage to amuse the reader, to make the reader listen to me, because most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage. I think what gives my works whatever universality they have is that they use the metaphysical secret world to describe some realities of the overt world."
"What the hell do you think spies are? Model philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not. They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me, little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants, playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong? (from a clip from the film adaptation of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, starring Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, an alcoholic cynical British spy)"
"Why was London the only capital in the world that lost its personality at night? Smiley, as he pulled his coat more closely about him, could think of nowhere, from Los Angeles to Berne, which so readily gave up its daily struggle for identity."
"Chic, that’s what he is—a barmaid’s dream of a real gentleman."
"The State is a dream, too, a symbol of nothing at all, an emptiness, a mind without a body, a game played with clouds in the sky. But States make war, don’t they, and imprison people?"
"He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors."
"He had the nerve not to drink in a University where you proved your manhood by being drunk most of your first year."
"Can’t you see it’s the same? The same guns, the same children dying in the streets? Only the dream has changed, the blood is the same colour."
"I shall have to wear the special grin I reserve for bearing really disastrous tidings."
"He hated the Press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass-media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth century. Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism."
"I thought it would be valuable to record the events—even if they did not take place."
"He was one of those world-builders who seem to do nothing but destroy: that’s all."
"He caught the midnight plane to Zurich. It was a beautiful night, and through the small window beside him he watched the grey wing, motionless against the starlit sky, a glimpse of eternity between two worlds. The vision soothed him, calmed his fears and his doubts, made him fatalistic towards the inscrutable purpose of the universe. It all seemed to matter so little—the pathetic quest for love, or the return to solitude."
"I used to regard a road sweeper as a person inferior to myself. Now, I rather doubt it. Something is dirty, he makes it clean, and the state of the world is advanced. But I—what have I done? Entrenched a ruling class which is distinguished by neither talent, culture, nor wit; kept alive for one more generation the distinctions of a dead age."
"It was from us they learnt the secret of life: that we grow old without growing wise. They realised that nothing happened when we grew up: no blinding light on the road to Damascus, no sudden feeling of maturity."
"I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them."
"Such an effort being with people—on stage all the time."
"“The value of intelligence depends on its breeding.” That was John Landsbury’s favorite dictum. Until you know the pedigree of the information you cannot evaluate a report. Yes, that was what he used to say: “We are not democratic. We close the door on intelligence without parentage.”"
"It was no use relating reports to probability when there was no quantum of knowledge from which to start."
"But so many men learnt strength during the war, learnt terrible things, and put aside their knowledge with a shudder when it ended."