John le Carre World Quotations

Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.

When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.

The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.

If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.