Le Carre Quotes

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.

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

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes

After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.

To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul. German is such a language. Once you have it in your head, you can go there anytime, you can close the door, you have a refuge.

Do you want it flowery or straight.’ She bites her lip. ‘ Straight.’ ‘I wanted to fuck you senseless from the moment our eyes met.’ ‘And the flowery version?’ ‘Now I think about it, there is no flowery version. It is what it is.

I’d rather be a whore than a banker.’ ‘That’s handy then. I’d rather be a banker who buys a whore.

Yes, dear Father. But has it ever occurred to you that by controlling [your feelings] you destroy them? How many times can we say sorry before we don't feel sorry anymore?

He is seized by an unthinking, irresistible call to hunt. To possess. To own her.

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.

But the first bedtime story he ever did read me was Kim.' River could tell she recognised the title, so didn't elaborate. 'After that, well, Conrad, Greene. Somerset Maugham.' 'Ashenden.' 'You get the picture. For my twelfth birthday, he bought me le Carré's collected works. I can still remember what he said about them.' They're made up. But that doesn't mean they're not true.

George Smiley: [quoting an old letter from Bill Haydon about Jim Prideaux] He has that heavy quiet that commands. He's my other half. Between us we'd make one marvelous man. He asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends, and I'm vastly tickled by the compliment. He's virgin, about eight foot tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge

Power sits uneasily on those one has grown up with. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Spy.

Sometimes we are so comfortable in our little cages that someone has to come along, rip open the door and destroy the whole cage before we will look around us and realize that there is a whole world out there outside our little cage.

Waking and sleeping she had demanded to know where she belonged in a white man's world, and how and where she should invest her ambition and her humanity

John Le Carre said that authenticity is less important than plausibility.

The crowd is bobbing round him and he is part of it, the free people of the earth have taken him among them. He is one with all these grown-up happy children celebrating their independence of things that never held them.

That is how I feel about you. You are my doll. I like the idea of dressing you the way I see fit. I want you to look good. Besides, I like that every stitch on your body has been paid for by me.

Love is just a word until someone comes along and gives it meaning.

Ain’t nothing to be afraid of, honey. Take a deep breath and count to what you are. A ten.

You aren’t wealthy until you have something money can’t buy. —Garth Brooks

My beautiful whore. Once I was good to you and you kicked me when I was down; now you get what you deserve.

Mine,’ he says possessively.  ‘You’re mine to do with as I please.

A noi fa piacere che uomini come Beecham esistano: essi incarnano tutto ciò che vi è di oscuro nel nostro mondo, nella nostra società. Ma le cose che hanno fatto di Beecham un mostro? Bè, quelle le tolleriamo, anzi, ne godiamo...

I don't break down," she announced. "Got it?" He got it. He was already pulling back, looking ashamed of himself, but somehow he was still holding her wrist. "I never break down. I'm a lawyer.

All music is beautiful and good, but classical music alone is food for the soul,

He has already left his mark on her. She must leave her mark on him. She lies naked but for her necklace, and realizes she doesn’t know how to.

When our time is over, I must return you the way I found you, pure and innocent.

From the first moment I saw you I wanted you. Not in the compartmentalized way I wanted the others, the length of leg, the jut of a butt, or the strain of material caused by a well-shaped chest. When I saw you I had to have all of you as mine. I would have paid any price that night to buy you.

Now I know whatever he guards so carefully inside must surely be truly precious or ugly beyond words.

You just didn’t kill the power behind the throne.

Sometime ago I had my soul put in a box and delivered to you.

Do you own this?” “It’s registered to the bank of Utah.” “But really it’s yours?” He shrugs. “Own nothing control everything.

Learn the facts, Steed-Asprey used to say, then try on the stories like clothes.

Tall, impressive, separate from the crowd, a ruler; and yet he looks alone and abandoned. I remember what he told me a long time ago. I trust no one. No one.

Even if there is no hope, I still want whatever I can have. I want him on any terms.

It submits with pleasure to the tide. It’s a willing consummation. The way I have been crumbling into you from the first night I laid eyes on you.

He reminds her of a panther. Prowling and ready to pounce, full of suppressed restless energy. Muscular, strong.

Her mind takes a picture of him, shirtless and wearing only his low-slung jeans. To be kept for later, when he is no longer around.

The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the street. John D. Rockefeller

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” – John Le Carre

If it wasn’t love, it was an addiction … never a pair of lips made me come back so many times for a kiss.’                                                                    - German Renko

I am so sick of theory Teddy,” says Sasha as his movement and ideals collapse. “I am ready to give up half of what I believe in exchange for one clarifying vision. To see one great rational truth glowing on the horizon, to go to it regardless of the cost, regardless of what must be left behind, is what I dream of beyond all things. Will tomorrow change me? Nothing changes me. It is only the world that changes.

Page 112 The Honorable Schoolboy He was attended this morning by his wife, a former Bible School teacher from Borneo, a dried- out shrew in bobbed hair and ankle socks who could spot a sin before it was committed.

No country was ever easier to spy on, Tom, no nation so open-hearted with its secrets, so quick to air them, confide them, or consign them too early to the junk heap of planned American obsolescence. I am too young to know whether there was a time when Americans were able to restrain their admirable passion to communicate, but I doubt it. Certainly the path has been downhill since 1945, for it was quickly apparent that information which ten years ago would have cost Axl's service thousands of dollars in precious hard currency could by the mid-70s be had for a few coppers from the Washington Post. We could have resented this sometimes, if we had smaller natures, for there are few things more vexing in the spy world than landing a scoop for Prague and London one week, only to read the same material in Aviation Weekly the next. But we did not complain. In the great fruit garden of American technology, there were pickings enough for everyone and none of us need ever want for anything again.

It is only when he speaks German, as now, that he allows himself to lament the enslavement of the world's downtrodden classes. "We cannot live in a bubble, Mr. Mundy. Comfortable ignorance is not a solution. In German student societies that I was not permitted to join, they made a toast: 'Better to be a salamander, and live in the fire.

Guy had abandoned me just like that. With just my passport. Not even a penny. He didn’t care at all. If Margaret had not helped me, God knows where I would have spent the night, or even what would have happened to me. I fought back the tears at his callousness.

Perfect Spy?” Reece said, reading the title. “You’re a le Carré fan?” “Only spy novelist worth a damn,” Danreb replied, opinionated as ever. “Other than McCarry, of course. Charles McCarry is in a league of his own.” “The Paul Christopher series.” “You’ve read them? I’ve never met anyone younger than seventy who has read McCarry.

You can tell a man’s health by the strength of his morning piss.

If you want to hit a man in the chest, aim for his groin.

The secret to the labyrinth is always at the beginning. Before you enter. Once you do it is too late.

He opened the door, and after feeling the height of the seat, I hopped in, as nimble as a goat. Well, that’s what my Ma used to call me. A stubborn, nimble goat. 

Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

Miko. I can’t have you calling me Mr. Barokas while my cock is deep inside your pussy.

tomorrow.  You won’t burn it, will you?’ ‘Maybe just the salad.

You are not coming.” His voice is suddenly hard. I step away from him. “Why not?” “Because you never take your beloved gerbil to a viper’s den.

But he has an even better idea. “Come sit on my cock,” he commands.

Kiss the rain, whenever you need me,' she once said. 'I kissed the rain last night and you never came,' I whisper.

His cock is inked.

Shut up," Jim snapped, quite angry. "Rude pigs, shut up.

You met him yesterday and he agreed to give you fifty thousand pounds.’ ‘Mmnnn.’ I make a production of munching. ‘Why?’ ‘Guess it must have been love at first sight.

I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention

Page 56 The Honorable Schoolboy Czarist imperialist running dogs drank tasteless coffee with divisive, deviationist, chauvinist, Stalinists and were proud of it.

Writing doesn’t get easier. Every novel is a first novel.

Ah, this is like all bankers are thieves, all lawyers are liars, and all women are whores.’ ‘I’d rather be a whore than a banker.’ ‘That’s handy then. I’d rather be a banker who buys a whore.

…he seems devastatingly, impossibly handsome, but so aloof and unreachable that it is almost as if she has her nose pressed against a glass window and is looking in at something she can never have.

You will never know how lonely I was without you, but you have to understand that I am only strong when I am certain you are safe. And you are only safe when you are innocent. You can never come to me. Always I will make the journey to you.

When you are reading something, Mr. Mundy, ask yourself why you are reading it. Are you reading something for information? That is one reason. Or are you reading it for knowledge? Information is only the path, Mr. Mundy. The goal is knowledge.

He was in late age, yet his tradecraft had never been better; for the first time in his career, he held the advantage over his old adversary. On the other hand, that adversary had acquired a human face of disconcerting clarity. It was no brute whom Smiley was pursuing with such mastery, no unqualified fanatic after all, no automaton. It was a man; and one whose downfall, if Smiley chose to bring it about, would be caused by nothing more sinister than excessive love, a weakness with which Smiley himself, from his own tangled life, was eminently familiar.

Once we bring an explicit long-term memory back into working memory, it becomes a short-term memory again. When we reconsolidate it, it gains a new set of connections—a new context. As Joseph LeDoux explains, “The brain that does the remembering is not the brain that formed the initial memory. In order for the old memory to make sense in the current brain, the memory has to be updated.”30 Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal.

I, Billy Joe Pilkington, by the life that courses within my blood and the love that resides within my heart, take thee Layla Eden to my hand, my heart, and my spirit to be my chosen one. To desire thee and be desired by thee. To possess thee and be possessed by thee without sin or shame, for naught can exist in the purity of my love for thee. I promise to love thee wholly and completely without restraint, in sickness and in health, in plenty and in poverty, in life and beyond, where we shall meet, remember, and love again. I shall not seek to change thee in any way. I shall respect thee, thy beliefs, thy people, and thy ways as I respect myself.

I sighed, resigned to the prospect of waiting. I refused to make silly mistakes with my body. I had no room for babies or diseases in my life.

Mother, I have made a bird of prey my lover, When I give him bits of bread he doesn’t eat, So I feed him with the flesh of my heart. —Shiv Kumar Batalvi

Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet. -Bob Marley

No, when you strip it all down to the bare truth. The only person anybody ever really cares about is the man in the mirror. If it’s between you and me then, fuck you, I’m going to make one hundred percent sure no matter what I have to do that it’s going to be me climbing out of that snake pit. Anybody who pretends otherwise is either lying or completely deluded.

You only realize how precious it is when it is gone.

She comes further into the room and even the billowing layers of curtains cannot conceal her great beauty or youth. Certainly, she is far too young for her dining companion who has just barged in with all the grace of a retired rugby player. I recognize his swollen head instantly. Rupert Lothian. An over-privileged, nerve gratingly colossal ass. He is one of the bank’s high profile private customers. The bank never does business with anyone they do not check out first and his report was sickening

People were happier, felt more fulfilled by what they were dong, while they were at work than during their leisure hours. In their free time, they tended to feel bored and anxious. And yet they didn't like to be at work. When they were on the job, they expressed a strong desire to be off the job, and when they were off the job, the last thing they wanted was to go back to work. 'We have,' reported Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre, 'the paradoxical situation of people having many more positive feelings at work than in leisure, yet saying that they 'wish to be doing something else' when they are at work, not when they are in leisure.' We're terrible, the experiment revealed, at anticipating which activities will satisfy us and which will leave us discontented. Even when we're in the midst of doing something, we don't seem able to judge its psychic consequences accurately. Those are symptoms of a more general affliction, on which psychologists have bestowed the poetic name miswanting. We're inclined to desire things we don't like and to like things we don't desire.

Strength doesn’t always mean a woman never cries or has a breakdown, or a woman who never gives an inch to man because that could be interpreted as her being weak. But it definitely means a woman who quietly rebuilds her life after it is shattered through no fault of her own. You’re a fucking warrior, Snow.

Definitely. You cannot write about what you do not know, nor can you write for people you do not understand. You’ll need to know Rome intimately before you begin to write even one sentence.

What’s the hold-up?” she demands bossily. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing,” I say. “Well, get on with it then.

Sad that everything I believed in is gone. Sad that I can never have anything more than sex with Nikolai.

My heart starts to race. Somehow I know why I’m being summoned even before I step into his office.

when you live in a lake you don’t antagonize the crocodiles.

a secret's worth depends on the people it must be kept.

Look again, Cole. It’s a beautiful world. So very beautiful I say a prayer of gratitude every time I wake up because every day that I open my eyes is a precious gift.

worried

You can forget so many evenings of sadness For a morning of tenderness.                         —Je sais, Jean Gabin

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” —JOHN LE CARR

The Mouse On The Bar Room Floor Some Guinness was spilt on the bar room floor When the pub was shut for the night. Out of his hole crept a wee brown mouse And, in the pale moonlight, He lapped up the frothy brew from the floor, Then back on his haunches he sat. And all night long you could hear him roar, ‘Bring on the goddamn cat!’ —An Irish Tall Tale

Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other. —Karl, Age 5

No one can take what is truly yours away from you,’ she says, and I smile.

All will be well.  Just be yourself and nothing can be more beautiful.

This is not my Blake.  Yet, he is mine.  This Blake lives inside the Blake that I know and I want this Blake too.  This Blake is my opponent, but this Blake also holds secrets.  Secrets that I want.  I am not all light and he is not all dark.  To be whole, to know him completely I only have to embrace his darkness and make it mine. Do I have sufficient bravery? Of course I do.   I will take my torch and go where love takes me.

Life should be lived to the point of tears.” —Albert Camus

We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance.  Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." —John Swinton, Head of Editorial Staff, New York Times, at a banquet thrown in his honour, 1880

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only. ―Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Not to dream boldly may turn out to be irresponsible” —George Leonard

Maybe the lust was real, but what is lust but dust without love?

The wolf that came to you is called Lobo. He has chosen you to be his special human. Once a wolf chooses a human it will never again treat another human with the same love and affection that it does to the special person it chose.