John le Carre quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, John le Carre has a lot to say. In this list we present the 20 best John le Carre quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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John le Carre quotes
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
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
I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.
— John le Carre
I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.
— John le Carre
I don’t know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.
— John le Carre
If you’re growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended back.
— John le Carre
SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.
— John le Carre
The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James’s Park Tube station in London.
— John le Carre
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
It’s necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It’s absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It’s the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.
— John le Carre
I wrote ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.
— John le Carre
I’ve had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.
— John le Carre
History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
— John le Carre
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
— 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
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
— John le Carre
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
‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.
— John le Carre
Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they’re casting, they’re dressing the scene, they’re working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they’re also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
— John le Carre
Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they’re casting, they’re dressing the scene, they’re working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they’re also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
— John le Carre
My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.
— John le Carre
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