Top 100 John le Carré Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.”

— John le Carré

52. “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 Carré

53. “For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.”

— John le Carré

54. “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 Carré

55. “The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous.”

— John le Carré

56. “To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul. German is such a language. Once you have it in your head, you can go there anytime, you can close the door, you have a refuge.”

— John le Carré

57. “Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.”

— John le Carré

58. “Never trade a secret, you’ll always get the short end of the bargain.”

— John le Carré

59. “Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.”

— John le Carré

60. “All men are born free: just not for long.”

— John le Carré

61. “I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton.”

— John le Carré

62. “It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.”

— John le Carré

63. “If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.”

— John le Carré

64. “A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue.”

— John le Carré

65. “I’m really a library man, or second-hand book man.”

— John le Carré

66. “I don’t know whether it’s age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.”

— John le Carré

67. “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.”

— John le Carré

68. “Power expands through the distribution of secrecy.”

— John le Carré

69. “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 Carré

70. “If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.”

— John le Carré

71. “I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.”

— John le Carré

72. “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 Carré

73. “He has the gift of quiet.”

— John le Carré

74. “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

75. “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 Carré

76. “For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.”

— John le Carré

77. “There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven’t.”

— John le Carré

78. “Elections are a Western jerk-off.”

— John le Carré

79. “Love means having something to betray.”

— John le Carré

80. “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 Carré

81. “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

82. “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 Carré

83. “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 Carré

84. “As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.”

— John le Carré

85. “When you’re my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you’re seeing the show come round again.”

— John le Carré

86. “I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.”

— John le Carré

87. “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 Carré

88. “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

89. “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 Carré

90. “Completing a book, it’s a little like having a baby.”

— John le Carré

91. “Let’s die of it before we’re too old.”

— John le Carré

92. “The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.”

— John le Carré

93. “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 Carré

94. “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 Carré

95. “What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life’s miseries?”

— John le Carré

96. “I move my lips when I read – I’m painfully slow – so I like really good English.”

— John le Carré

97. “Yet it’s not for want of future that I’m here, he thought. It’s for want of a present.”

— John le Carré

98. “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 Carré

99. “Everyone who is not happy must be shot.”

— John le Carré

100. “There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.”

— John le Carré