Quotes from le carre john ii

There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo.

It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three.

I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

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

Betrayal can only happen if you love.

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of The Wind in the Willows, which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital.

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.

To possess another language is to possess another soul.

He met failure as one day he would probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary.

I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck.

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

Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.

No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn.

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.

A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.

Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.

Luck's just another word for destiny ... either you make your own or you're screwed.