George, you won,' said Guillam, as they walked slowly towards the car.'Did I?' said Smiley. 'Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did.
Charlie alone knew he was a ghost.
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 ol...
Doubtful, we shall know where the
When the truth catches up with you, don’t be a hero, run.
They loved each other and believed they loved mankind, they fought each other and believed they fought the world.
In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job.
Espionage is not a cricket game
Afterwards Smiley always thought of that interview as a fan dance; a calculated progression of disclosures, each revealing different parts of a mysterious entity. Finally Steed-Asprey, who seemed to b...
I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British...
The fact you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
Percebeu então o que Liz lhe tinha dado, aquilo que teria de procurar readquirir se alguma vez regressasse a Inglaterra: era o interesse pelas pequenas coisas, a fé na vida comum, a simplicidade que f...
He knew then what it was that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England; it was the caring about little things - the faith in ordinary life; th...
By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed. Then we have a war. This war.
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...
One of those world builders who do othing but destroy,
Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism. ...when had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom?
'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.