Yes, dear Father. But has it ever occurred to you that by [your feelings] you destroy them? How many times can we say sorry before we don't feel sorry anymore?
I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.
There's no way out, he announced with satisfaction, and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won't go back in its bottle, the face-off is for ever, the embrace gets tighter and th...
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...
Let's die of it before we're too old.
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.
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...
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
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...
I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.
Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.
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...
By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.
He was proud of having thrown caution
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.
Sauntering
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...
My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.
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...