“There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed.”
— John le Carré
“The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous”
— John le Carré
“Home’s where you go when you run out of homes.”
— John le Carré
“The vertical manThough we value noneBut the horizontal one.”
— John le Carré
“A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they’re nowhere.”
— John le Carré
“Haydon had found his charm again. He could do that at the drop of a hat. He drew you and he repelled you. I remember that exactly. He danced all ways for you, playing your emotions against each other because he had none of his own.”
— John le Carré
“He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man”
— John le Carré
“Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.”
— John le Carré
“He had the nerve not to drink in a University where you proved your manhood by being drunk most of your first year.”
— John le Carré
“There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one’s own generation.”
— John le Carré
“I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn’t. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one’s aims are, that’s the trouble, specially if you’re British.”
— John le Carré
“I don’t break down,” she announced. “Got it?”He got it. He was already pulling back, looking ashamed of himself, but somehow he was still holding her wrist.”I never break down. I’m a lawyer.”
— John le Carré
“… in moments of crisis our thoughts do not run consecutively but rather sweep over us in waves or intuition and experience …”
— John le Carré
“If there’s no sea-gull there’s no meeting, Wicklow had said. No sea-gull means abort. That’s my epitaph, thought Barley. ‘There was no sea-gull, so he aborted.”
— John le Carré
“We have to live without sympathy, don’t we? That’s impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren’t like that really, I mean…one can’t be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold…d’you see what I mean?”
— John le Carré
“I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,’ Smiley went on, more lightly. ‘Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.”
— John le Carré
“Put it this way, George,” he suggested, when he had savoured the night air for a moment. “You traveling on business, or for pleasure in this thing? Which is it?Smiley’s reply was also slow in coming, and as indirect: “I was never conscious of pleasure,” he said. “Or perhaps I mean: of the distinction.”
— John le Carré
“She’s become a Russian again, he thought. When something works, she’s grateful. When it doesn’t work, it’s life.”
— John le Carré
“Some people are agents from birth, Monsignors — he told them — appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first, Your Eminences: ‘Whether it’s us, whether it’s the opposition, or whether it’s the bloody missionaries.”
— John le Carré
“He sees passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included.”
— John le Carré
“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.”
— John le Carré
“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.”
— John le Carré
“Tessa distinguished absolutely between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is journalistic pain. It’s diplomatic pain. It’s television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. Those who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it. They were the bad Samaritans.”
— John le Carré
“His intuition was luminous from the instant you met him. So was his intelligence. A lot of actors act intelligent, but Philip was the real thing: a shining, artistic polymath with an intelligence that came at you like a pair of headlights and enveloped you from the moment he grabbed your hand, put a huge arm round your neck and shoved a cheek against yours; or if the mood took him, hugged you to him like a big, pudgy schoolboy, then stood and beamed at you while he took stock of the effect. (About Philip Seymour Hoffman)”
— John le Carré
“It is only when he speaks German, as now, that he allows himself to lament the enslavement of the world’s downtrodden classes. “We cannot live in a bubble, Mr. Mundy. Comfortable ignorance is not a solution. In German student societies that I was not permitted to join, they made a toast: ‘Better to be a salamander, and live in the fire.”
— John le Carré
“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.”
— John le Carré
“By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.”
— John le Carré
“This is a war,” Lemas replied. “It’s graphic and unpleasant because it’s fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it’s nothing, nothing at all besides other wars – the last or the next.”
— John le Carré
“I would say that since the war, our methods-out and those of the opposition-have become much the same. I mean you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s ‘policy’ is benevolent, can you now?”
— John le Carré
“There’s no way out,” he announced with satisfaction, “and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won’t go back in its bottle, the face-off is for ever, the embrace gets tighter and the toys cleverer with every generation, and there’s no such thing for either side as enough security. Not for the main players, not for the nasty little newcomers who each year run themselves up a suitcase bomb and join the club. We get tired of believing that, because we’re human. We may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away. It never will. Never, never, never.””So, who’ll save us then, Walt?” Barley asked. “You and Nedsky?””Vanity, if anything will, which I doubt,” Walter retorted. “No leader wants to go down in history as the ass who destroyed his country in an afternoon. And funk, I suppose. Most of our gallant politicians do have a narcissistic objection to suicide, thank God.”
— John le Carré