348 Quotes by John le Carré

Home’s where you go when you run out of homes.

You can’t make war against terror. Terror is a technique of battle. It’s a tactic that has been employed since time immemorial. You can conduct clandestine action against terrorists, and that must be done.

It’s easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.

I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn’t. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one’s aims are, that’s the trouble, specially if you’re British.

There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one’s own generation.

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.

A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can’t alter his power over you. You can’t alter what you love or owe. And it’s too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.

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.

You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it’s not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.