348 Quotes by John le Carré

The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It’s just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.

Remember Graham Green’s dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

Those who are not with Mr. Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I’m dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam’s downfall – just not on Bush’s terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.

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.

Completing a book, it’s a little like having a baby.

What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life’s miseries?

Yet it’s not for want of future that I’m here, he thought. It’s for want of a present.

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

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.