3 December 2020 John le Carre 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 needs to lose.
3 December 2020 John le Carre 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 than the public has been allowed to know.
3 December 2020 John le Carre I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.
3 December 2020 John le Carre If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
3 December 2020 John le Carre You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it’s not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.
3 December 2020 John le Carre A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
3 December 2020 John le Carre 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 perhaps with our marriage.
3 December 2020 John le Carre During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn’t easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
3 December 2020 John le Carre When you’re my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I’d just like to get a few more novels under my belt.
3 December 2020 John le Carre The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James’s Park Tube station in London.
3 December 2020 John le Carre I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.
3 December 2020 John le Carre My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.
3 December 2020 John le Carre More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
3 December 2020 John le Carre 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 old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.
3 December 2020 John le Carre I don’t know whether it’s age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.
3 December 2020 John le Carre But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it’s the writer or the spy.
3 December 2020 John le Carre By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.
