134 quotes found
“History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody ne...”
“A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.”
“The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and...”
“If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.”
“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 ev...”
“'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.”
“Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene ...”
“Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they'...”
“My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.”
“Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and ...”
“Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resi...”
“She had the experience to suffer with discretion.”
“Some men will never be heroes, some heroes will never be men, he thought, with urgent acknowledgements to Joseph Conrad.”
“To dream in doctrines, how tidy!”
“He has the gift of quiet.”
“Gossip till the cows come home.”
“Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and ...”
“In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex t...”
“Everyone who is not happy must be shot.”
“A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.”
