134 quotes found
“one of those world builders who do othing but destroy,”
“Afterwards Smiley always thought of that interview as a fan dance; a calculated progression of disclosures, each revealing different parts of a mysterious entity. Finally Steed-Asprey, who seemed t...”
“We've had enough." He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. "We've had a bellyful, in fact.""And like everyone who's had enough," said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, "he wan...”
“When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.”
“society is unconcerned with the aftermath of sensation.”
“But despite such energetic mental exercise, the ghosts of time present would intrude and drive his dreams away. It was Ann who had robbed him of his peace, Ann who had once made the present so impo...”
“Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.”
“Don't give it to them all at once, make them work for it. Confuse them with detail, leave things out, go back on your tracks. Be testy, be cussed, be difficult. Drink like a fish; don't give way on...”
“They might have you, and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company.”
“And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackness, that his life has consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed ...”
“I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.”
“I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secre...”
“I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.”
“If you're growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended...”
“SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.”
“The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.”
“It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into inte...”
“It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity...”
“I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the Brit...”
“I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.”
