John le Carre Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

More John le Carre quote about:

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”
-- John le Carre

#Inspirational #Leadership #Reality
“The only reward for love is the experience of loving.”
-- John le Carre

#Love #Dream #Love Is
“A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.”
-- John le Carre

#Spy #Population #Literature
“During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.”
-- John le Carre

#War #Literature #Shade
“Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.”
-- John le Carre

#Movie #Reading #Book
“Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.”
-- John le Carre

#Love #Betrayal #Betrayed
“Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the ***** and angels of our striving selves.”
-- John le Carre

#Angel #Heart #Self
“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

#News #Literature #Secrecy
“The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other catâ€™s mat is a story.”
-- John le Carre

#Writing #Cat #Stories
“He has the gift of quiet.”
-- John le Carre

#Quiet
“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

#Cowboy #Thinking #Play
“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

#Ignorance #Experts #World
“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

#Spy #World #Couches
“It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.”
-- John le Carre

#Luck #Forget #Easy
“God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow.”
-- John le Carre

#Night #Heaven #Wow
“Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.”
-- John le Carre

#Survival #Infinite #Capacity
“There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.”
-- John le Carre

#Stuff #Too Much #Moments
“After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.”
-- John le Carre

#Enemy #Looks #Fool
“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

#Children #Mistake #Home
“Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.”
-- John le Carre

#Jesus #Jesus Christ #Twelve
“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

#War #Men #Thinking
“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

#Regret #Men #Over You
“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.”
-- John le Carre

#Lonely #Writing #Thinking
“But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.”
-- John le Carre

#Real #Lying #Thinking
“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

#Order #Answers #Our Actions
“Everyone who is not happy must be shot.”
-- John le Carre

#Not Happy #Shots
“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

#Eight #Solitude #Age
“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

#Cat #Compassion #Spy
“Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.”
-- John le Carre

#Spy #Matter #Habit
“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

#Morality #Trouble #Method

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