Quotes from John le Carre

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

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

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

I suffer from the same frustration that every decent American suffers from. That is, that you begin to wonder whether decent liberal instincts, decent humanitarian instincts, can actually penetrate the right-wing voice, get through the steering of American opinion by the mass media.

In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even show passes to go in and out of the building.

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.

Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch.

For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.

Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.

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.

God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.

In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.

I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

I do believe very much in movie as a one-man-show. I think that where I've watched movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

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.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.

In the '60s - and right up to the present day - the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a state secret. To divulge it is a crime. The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them.

We lie to one another every day, in the sweetest way, often unconsciously. We dress ourselves and compose ourselves in order to present ourselves to one another.

I write and walk and swim and drink.

All power corrupts but some must govern.