A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
- John Le Carre Quote

America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.
- John Le Carre Quote

Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.
- John Le Carre Quote

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
- John Le Carre Quote

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.
- John le Carre Quote

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
- John le Carre Quote

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 Quote

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 Carre Quote

I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
- John Le Carre Quote

I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
- John Le Carre Quote

I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no one else can make them.
- John Le Carre Quote

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 Carre Quote

I've always had difficulties with female characters.
- John Le Carre Quote

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.
- John Le Carre Quote

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
- John le Carre Quote

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 Quote

Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
- John le Carre Quote

People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.
- John Le Carre Quote

Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.
- John Le Carre Quote

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
- John Le Carre Quote

The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received.
- John Le Carre Quote

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
- John Le Carre Quote

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 Quote

We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
- John Le Carre Quote

We lie to one another every day, in the sweetest way, often unconsciously. We dress ourselves and compose ourselves in order to present ourselves to one another.
- John Le Carre Quote

You should have died when I killed you.
- John le Carre Quote