I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.
You see, for us it does, Fiedler continued. I myself would have put a bomb in a restaurant if it brought us farther along the road. Afterwards I would draw the balance—so many women, so many children;...
Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and tho...
There was only now [ ... ] There was no tomorrow because tomorrow was the excuse. There was now or there was nowhere.
Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
Reason as motive, or reason as logic, or reason as a way of life?
Either she knew exactly, or not at all, the power of each slight gesture she made.
Dining alone had always been his particular pleasure, and tonight, in deference to the war’s depletion, Maître Berri had promoted him from his single-seater by the service door to one of the high alta...
Austerity pleased her—it gave her the comfort of sacrifice.
Ashe was typical of that stratum of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resist...
But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.
Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even,...
A night-time journey of the soul
You could be the perfect spy. All you need is a cause.
Leamas saw. He saw the long road outsideRotterdam, the long straight road beside thedunes, and the stream of refugees movingalong it; saw the little aeroplane miles away,the procession stop and look t...
It was his shoes, he noticed to his pleasure, that she most objected to; and he thought: bloody good, that's what shoes are for.
It is said that men condemned to death are subject to sudden moments of elation; as if, like moths in the fire, their destruction were coincidental with attainment.
It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
Information is not knowledge, mind you.
I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. —W. H. AUDEN