Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.― John le Carré

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

 

“Home's where you go when you run out of homes.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.”
― John le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.”
― 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 Carré, A Perfect Spy

“The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.”
― John le Carré, A Most Wanted Man

“There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.”
― John Le Carre

“The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous”
― John le Carré

“The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.”
― John le Carré

“Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“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, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“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

“Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.”
― John le Carré

“All men are born free: just not for long.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“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 Carre

“After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.”
― John LeCarre

“It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“...in the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery...”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“You should have died when I killed you.”
― John le Carré

“An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function:”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.”
― 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, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

“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, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“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, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

“Everyone who is not happy must be shot.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“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, The Constant Gardener