John le Carre Literature Quotations

Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

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.

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.

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.

America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

You should have died when I killed you.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received.

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