348 Quotes by John le Carré

I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.

I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.

I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton

Love means having something to betray.

Most of us live in a condition of secrecy: secret desires, secret appetites, secret hatreds and relationship with the institutions which is extremely intense and uncomfortable. These are, to me, a part of the ordinary human condition. So I don't think I'm writing about abnormal things. ... Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God,

The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.

It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day.

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