Quote

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

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
Saint
Martyr
Spies
Fool
Indians
Cowboys
Lives
Cowboy
Espionage
Play
Rotten
Martyrs
Sadists
Think
Saints
Drunkards
Squalid
Thinking
Fools
Procession
Pansies
People
Priests
Spy
Brighten
Vain
Traitor
Traitors

More quotes by John le Carre

Image
Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.
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
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
John le Carre
Image
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
Image
I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.
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
The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
John le Carre
Image
Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch.
John le Carre
Image
As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
John le Carre
Image
I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
John le Carre
Image
Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
John le Carre
Image
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
Image
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 Carre
Image
All men are born free: just not for long.
John le Carre
Image
In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
John le Carre
Image
The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy.
John le Carre
Image
The greatest threat to mankind comes from the renunciation of individual scruple in favor of institutional denominators. . . . Real heroism lies, as it always will, not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage. Which, come to think of it, is what we used to admire in our Christian savior
John le Carre
Image
I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
John le Carre
Image
Every writer knows he is spurious every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
John le Carre
Image
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
John le Carre