He met failure as one day he would probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary.
A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.
If you're growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended ba...
I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.
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.
He was proud of having thrown caution
He asked, in a more tentative tone, What’s the
It was simpler in those days. We could say they’d died for their country. We didn’t have to tell them the details; they didn’t expect that.
If a decade of diplomatic life had taught Toby one thing, it was to treat every crisis as normal and soluble.
However closely we live together, at whatever time of day or night we sound the deepest thoughts in one another, we know nothing.
He had never guessed it was possible to be frightened for so long.
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
We pretend a lot of things aren't there. Or we pretend that other things are more important. That's how we survive.
Put it this way, George, he suggested, when he had savoured the night air for a moment. You traveling on business, or for pleasure in this thing? Which is it?Smiley’s reply was also slow in coming, an...
It took Jonathan a moment to realize that Jeds was the woman. Not Jed, a single man, but Jeds a single woman in all her varieties.
He has a saying: he'll only believe what can be written on a postcard.
Don't give it to them all at once, make them work for it. Confuse them with detail, leave things out, go back on your tracks. Be testy, be cussed, be difficult. Drink like a fish; don't give way on th...
But we progress, Your Graces. Inexorably we progress. Albeit at the blind man’s speed, as we tap-tap along in the dark.
But despite such energetic mental exercise, the ghosts of time present would intrude and drive his dreams away. It was Ann who had robbed him of his peace, Ann who had once made the present so importa...