Author details
All John le Carre Quotes
I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.
John le Carre
63% of people like this 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
61% of people like this quote
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
John le Carre
58% of people like this quote
Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.
John le Carre
58% of people like this quote
Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
John le Carre
58% of people like this 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
57% of people like this 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
55% of people like this quote
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
54% of people like this 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
54% of people like this 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
53% of people like this quote
By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.
John le Carre
53% of people like this quote
Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.
John le Carre
52% of people like this quote
For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
John le Carre
52% of people like this quote
Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.
John le Carre
52% of people like this quote
Related authors