110+ John Le Carre Quotes On Friendship, Education And Writing

John le Carré was an English novelist and former intelligence officer. He wrote espionage novels that depicted the Cold War and the moral ambiguity of spy work. He is best known for his novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which was adapted into a film in 1965. Following is our collection on famous quotes by John Le Carre on life, love, friendship.

Top 10 John Le Carre Quotes

1. It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
2. During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
3. A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.
4. The only reward for love is the experience of loving.
5. Blackmail is more effective than bribery.
6. I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.
7. A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
8. A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.
9. Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
10. People are very secretive - secret even from themselves.

John Le Carre Short Quotes

• I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
• The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
• There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo.
• Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.
• The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous.
• By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.
• I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.
• A committee is an animal with four back legs.
• I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
• Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.

John Le Carre Quotes About Life

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. — John Le Carre

We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own. — John Le Carre

Life was to be a search, or nothing! But it was the fear that it was nothing that drove me forward. Every encounter was an encounter with myself. — John Le Carre

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

John Le Carre Quotes About Love

Love means having something to betray. — John Le Carre

A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways. — John Le Carre

Those who are not with Mr. Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall -- just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy. — John Le Carre

John Le Carre Quotes About Writing

A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger. — John Le Carre

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie. — John Le Carre

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack. — John Le Carre

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

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story. — John Le Carre

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain. — John Le Carre

I happen to write by hand. I don't even type. — John Le Carre

Without a pen in my hand I can't think. — John Le Carre

I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck. — John Le Carre

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. — John Le Carre

John Le Carre Quotes About Spy

For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed. — John Le Carre

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. — John Le Carre

Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided. — John Le Carre

The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on. — John Le Carre

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 Carre

The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started. — John Le Carre

It was a charming fantasy of romantics that the spies would stop spying, that political conflict would end and politicians would tell the truth. Unfortunately that has not been the case. — John Le Carre

John Le Carre Quotes About People

People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others. — John Le Carre

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. — John Le Carre

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

People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem. — John Le Carre

The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received. — John Le Carre

I think that all writers feel alienated. ... I know that I do. ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated. — John Le Carre

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 Carre

John Le Carre Quotes About Book

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby. — John Le Carre

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. — John Le Carre

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man. — John Le Carre

If I had to put a name to it, I would wish that all my books were entertainments. I think the first thing you've got to do is grab the reader by the ear, and make him sit down and listen. Make him laugh, make him feel. We all want to be entertained at a very high level. — John Le Carre

Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book. — John Le Carre

I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no one else can make them. — John Le Carre

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. — John Le Carre

Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm. — John Le Carre

John Le Carre Quotes About Writer

A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue. — John Le Carre

Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic. — John Le Carre

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do. — John Le Carre

I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives. — John Le Carre

John Le Carre Famous Quotes And Sayings

Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news. — John Le Carre

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

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

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 Carre

How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. — John Le Carre

Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen. — John Le Carre

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat. — John Le Carre

The pharmaceutical corporations are engaged in the systematic corruption of the medical profession, country by country — John Le Carre

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 Carre

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

All men are born free: just not for long. — John Le Carre

...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious. — John Le Carre

For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict. — John Le Carre

The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom; to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy. — John Le Carre

The greatest threat to mankind comes from the renunciation of individual scruple in favor of institutional denominators. . . . Real heroism lies, as it always will, not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage. Which, come to think of it, is what we used to admire in our Christian savior — John Le Carre

Agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation tunnelers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip readers and disguise artists. — John Le Carre

Why did I desert Labour? Total bloody disillusionment. The party was a corpse. It had no ideology, it became detached, old, spineless and needed to go. — John Le Carre

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. — John Le Carre

Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London. — John Le Carre

Elections are a Western jerk-off. — John Le Carre

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

You should have died when I killed you. — John Le Carre

Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it. — John Le Carre

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

Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed. — John Le Carre

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

No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn. — John Le Carre

In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery. — John Le Carre

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 Carre

I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang. — John Le Carre

Home's where you go when you run out of homes. — John Le Carre

I've always had difficulties with female characters. — John Le Carre

George Smiley: [quoting an old letter from Bill Haydon about Jim Prideaux] He has that heavy quiet that commands. He's my other half. Between us we'd make one marvelous man. He asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends, and I'm vastly tickled by the compliment. He's virgin, about eight foot tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge — John Le Carre

By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way. — John Le Carre

It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D. — John Le Carre

Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong. — John Le Carre

Everyone who is not happy must be shot. — John Le Carre

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

I think I'm in the same mood as ever, but in some ways more mature. I guess you could say that, at 65, when you've seen the world shape up as I have, there are only two things you can do: laugh or kill yourself. — John Le Carre

Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history. — John Le Carre

Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage. — John Le Carre

There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle no stone will be left standing. — John Le Carre

When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water. — John Le Carre

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead. — John Le Carre

I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it. — John Le Carre

All power corrupts but some must govern. — John Le Carre

It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three. — John Le Carre

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 Carre

Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishenss or indifference. Woodrew knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not. — John Le Carre

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 Carre

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? — John Le Carre

You can't make war against terror. Terror is a technique of battle. It's a tactic that has been employed since time immemorial. You can conduct clandestine action against terrorists, and that must be done. — John Le Carre

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of The Wind in the Willows, which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital. — John Le Carre

When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again. — John Le Carre

The good pupils are often brilliant, and they keep you on your toes and take you to the limits of your knowledge. The worst pupils provide a unique insight into the criminal mind. — John Le Carre

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, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know. — John Le Carre

We've had enough." He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. "We've had a bellyful, in fact." "And like everyone who's had enough," said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, "he wants more. — John Le Carre

On one hand we go like hell for every terror cell we can find, we penetrate it, we destroy it. On the other hand, there is a much bigger need for a political solution. — John Le Carre

Life Lessons by John Le Carre

1. John Le Carre teaches us to be wary of the power of governments and those in positions of authority, and to never take anything at face value.
2. He also encourages us to question the truth, and to be aware of the potential for deception and manipulation.
3. Finally, he reminds us to be vigilant in our pursuit of justice and to never give up on our ideals.