348 Quotes by John le Carré

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.

Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak. What I see in my country, progressively over these years, is that the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. The rich have become indifferent through a philosophy of greed, and the poorer have become hopeless because they're not properly cared for. That's actually something that is happening in many Western societies. Your own, I am told, is not free from it.

When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

[My novels] introduce levels of intelligence ... moral doubt [and] self-doubt, which may not pertain [to real-world espionage].

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.

Multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world's sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders.

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.