Everything in the world is true if you invent it hard enough and love the person it’s for!
Cyril, church warden and lead tenor in the choir, lives with mother, banned from unsupervised contact with schoolchildren; Harold, drunk dentist, early retirement, pretty thatched cottage off the Bodm...
Coffee he drinks—nothing else—just coffee all the time. He says Germans are too introspective to make good agents, and it all comes out in counterintelligence. He says counterintelligence people are l...
There were times when he confronted his own image as a man confronts an empty valley, and the vision propelled him forward again to experience as despair compels us to extinction. Sometimes he was lik...
She hardly cared. They wanted her. They knew her through and through; they knew her fragility and her plurality. And they still wanted her. They had stolen her in order to rescue her. After all her dr...
Lo raccontò in maniera semplice ma precisa, come un buon soldato rievoca una battaglia, non più col sapore della vittoria o della sconfitta ma unicamente con l'emozione del ricordo.
I always say South America’s the only place where you cut a gentleman his suit one week and see his statue wearing it the next.
He was witnessing an insane relay race in which each contestant ran faster and longer than the last, arriving nowhere but his own destruction
Did I fuck her? No, I bloody well didn’t. I made mute, frenzied love to her in pitch darkness for six life-altering hours, in an explosion of tension and lust between two bodies that had desired each...
But she did not say it, she kept rigidly silent. Ostrakova had already sworn to herself that she would restrain both her quick temper and her quick tongue, and she now physically enjoined herself to t...
Are you going to eat that? she inquired, indicating the food on the desk. Liz shook her head. Then I must, she declared, with a grotesque attempt at reluctance. They have given you a potato. You must...
An undertaker contemplates his funeral, the rich man his destitution, the gaoler his imprisonment, the debauchee his impotence. An actor’s greatest terror, I am told, is to watch the theatre empty its...
A man who lives apart, 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, of profess...
Arthur Braithwaite, known to Louisa and the children as God. And all right, strictly speaking Braithwaite did not exist. Why should he? Not every god has to exist in order to do his job.
Pain observed is journalistic pain. It's diplomatic pain. It's television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set.
Her instinct was to defend, to hoard the treasures of her life, to build about herself the symbols of normal existence.
He was blown, his agents were hanged, and he entered the long middle age of the grounded pro. He did hackwork in London, sometimes for Smiley, ran a few home-based operations, including a network of g...
Dieter had a theory that was pure Faust. Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective. He used to say that the greatest mistake man ever made was to distinguish between th...
And we dress, sir --? he murmured, feeling Osnard's gaze burning the nape of his neck. Most of my gentlemen seem to favour left these days. I don't it's political.This was his standard joke, calculat...
A terrorist for Karen is someone who has a bomb but no aeroplane.Ch. 4