I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention
She had the experience to suffer with discretion.
A man who lives a part, not to others but alone, is exposed to obvious psychological dangers. In itself the practice of deception is not particularly exacting. It is a matter of experience, a professi...
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 wants more.
I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.
Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
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 is...
Nobody can do corporate rot more discreetly than the spies. Nobody does better mission creep. Nobody knows better how to create an image of mysterious omniscience and hide behind it. Nobody does a bet...
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the ce...
I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.
By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.
My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.
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.
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 intelli...
Martindale had no valid claim on Smiley either professionally or socially. He worked on the fleshy side of the Foreign Office and his job consisted of lunching visiting dignitaries whom no one else wo...
In moments of crisis our thoughts do not run consecutively but rather sweep over us in waves or intuition and experience ...
Let's die of it before we're too old.
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're...
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.