Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John le Carre
Age: 89 †
Born: 1931
Born: October 19
Died: 2020
Died: December 12
Actor
Film Producer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Spy
Writer
Sweetwater
Texas
David John Moore Cornwell
David Cornwell
John le Carre
Consists
Luck
Intelligence
Forget
Easy
Windfall
Scoop
Espionage
Speculation

More quotes by John le Carre

Image
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
Image
I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.
John le Carre
Image
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
Image
Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
John le Carre
Image
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
Image
I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
John le Carre
Image
You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.
John le Carre
Image
Love means having something to betray.
John le Carre
Image
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
John le Carre
Image
Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.
John le Carre
Image
When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
John le Carre
Image
I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.
John le Carre
Image
All power corrupts but some must govern.
John le Carre
Image
The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.
John le Carre
Image
In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
John le Carre
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
John le Carre
Image
Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.
John le Carre