Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle no stone will be left standing.
It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.
Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.
The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous.
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.
But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.
Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.
Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.
I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.
When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.
Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.
Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.
I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.
It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.
Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West.
My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.
When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue.
There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.
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.
No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn.
The pharmaceutical corporations are engaged in the systematic corruption of the medical profession, country by country
Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.
I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.
Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.
Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.
I mean, you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?
It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.