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John le Carré

100 quotes

“Where I kick myself is where I think I actually contributed to the myth of the intelligence services being very good.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Halliwell's Film Companion (1985) by Leslie Halliwell, p. 281
“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.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Master of the Secret World: John le Carré on Deception, Storytelling and American Hubris" by Andrew Ross, in Salon (21 October 1996), also in Conversations with John Le Carré (2004), edited by Matthew J. B…
“Every writer wants to be believed. But every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Master of the Secret World: John le Carré on Deception, Storytelling and American Hubris" by Andrew Ross, in Salon (21 October 1996); also in Conversations with John le Carré (2004) edited by Matthew Josep…
“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.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Master of the Secret World: John le Carré on Deception, Storytelling and American Hubris" by Andrew Ross, in Salon (21 October 1996); also in Conversations with John le Carré (2004) edited by Matthew Josep…
“One... shouldn't underrate these networks of influence that flow out of enormous intelligence agencies like the CIA. There are guys sitting on certain floors of certain buildings whose sole job is to massage opinion. And in those days, the CIA was financing magazines, it was financing movies of its own.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2008 interview for the Criterion Collection about "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
“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)”
John le Carré (1931–2020) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in “The United States of America Has Gone Mad”: John le Carré on Iraq War, Israel & U.S. Militarism, Democracy Now! (25 December 2020)
“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.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Chic, that’s what he is—a barmaid’s dream of a real gentleman.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I shall have to wear the special grin I reserve for bearing really disastrous tidings.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I thought it would be valuable to record the events—even if they did not take place.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was one of those world-builders who seem to do nothing but destroy: that’s all.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Such an effort being with people—on stage all the time.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was no use relating reports to probability when there was no quantum of knowledge from which to start.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But so many men learnt strength during the war, learnt terrible things, and put aside their knowledge with a shudder when it ended.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Carne isn’t a school. It’s a sanatorium for intellectual lepers. The symptoms began when we came down from University; a gradual putrefaction of our intellectual extremities. From day to day our minds die, our spirits atrophy and rot. We watch the process in one another, hoping to forget it in ourselves.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Look,” he said. “We talk academic here, you know, wear academic dress and hold high table dinners in the Common Room; we have long graces in Latin that none of us can translate. We go to the Abbey and the wives sit in the hencoop in their awful hats. But it’s a charade. It means nothing.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These small, out-of-the-way villages are pretty strange places,” he concluded. “Often only three or four families, all so inbred you can no more sort them out than a barnful of cats. That’s where your village idiots come from. They call it the Devil’s Mark. I call it incest.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a peculiarity of Smiley’s character that throughout the whole of his clandestine work he had never managed to reconcile the means to the end. A stringent critic of his own motives, he had discovered after long observation that he tended to be less a creature of intellect than his tastes and habits might suggest; once in the war he had been described by his superiors as possessing the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin, which seemed to him not wholly unjust.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country’s enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed. Assimilation is his highest aim, he learns to love the crowds who pass him in the street without a glance; he clings to them for his anonymity and his safety.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Was she really so angry when Stella refused to take part in the rat race of gentility?”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Smiley was not opposed to social distinctions but he liked to make his own.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t know,” Cardew replied evenly. “And when I don’t know, I usually keep quiet.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“John Lansbury had remarked upon it: “You have sales resistance to the dramatic, Brim; the rare gift of contempt for what is urgent. I know of a dozen people who would pay you five thousand a year for telling them every day that what is important is seldom urgent. Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can’t experiment with tradition.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had come to the end of the chase, and was already sickened by the kill.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I read a story once about a poet who bathed himself in cold fountains so that he could recognise his own existence in the contrast.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Intelligence work has one moral law—it is justified by results.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus we do disagreeable things, but we are defensive. That, I think, is still fair. We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night. Is that too romantic? Of course, we occasionally do very wicked things”; he grinned like a schoolboy. “And in weighing up the moralities, we rather go in for dishonest comparisons; after all, you can’t compare the ideals of one side with the methods of the other, can you, now?”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would say that since the war, our methods—ours 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 (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Alec, what do you believe in? Don’t laugh—tell me.” She waited and at last he said: “I believe an eleven bus will take me to Hammersmith. I don’t believe it’s driven by Father Christmas.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I should have guessed you’d never have the guts to do your own dirty work, Fiedler. It’s typical of your rotten little half-country and your squalid little Service that you get big uncle to do your pimping for you. You are not a country at all, you’re not a government, you’re a fifth-rate dictatorship of political neurotics.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He possessed, however, that persistent inquisitiveness which for journalists and lawyers is an end in itself.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If they do not know what they want, how can they be so certain they are right?”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man who lives apart, not to others but alone, is exposed to obvious psychological dangers. In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am afraid that as a nation we tend to over-organise. Abroad that passes for efficiency.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes she thought Alec was right—you believed in things because you needed to; what you believed in had no value of its own, no function.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The English! The rich have eaten your future and your poor have given them the food—that’s what’s happened to the English.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And this is a prison for spies?” Liz persisted. “It is a prison for those who fail to recognize Socialist reality; for those who think they have the right to err; for those who slow down the march. Traitors,” she concluded briefly. “But what have they done?” “We cannot build communism without doing away with individualism. You cannot plan a great building if some swine builds his sty on your site.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then the people in this prison are intellectuals?” The woman smiled. “Yes,” she said, “they are reactionaries who call themselves progressive: they defend the individual against the state. Do you know what Khrushchev said about the counter-revolution in Hungary?” Liz shook her head. She must show interest, she must make the woman talk. “He said it would never have happened if a couple of writers had been shot in time.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs? I’d have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens that they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass that you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me.”
John le Carré (1931–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source