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Our Power Knows No Limits, Yet We Cannot Find Food For A Starving Child, Or A Home For A Refugee. Our Knowledge Is Without Measure And We Build The Weapons That Will Destroy Us. We Live On The Edge Of Ourselves, Terrified Of The Darkness Within. We Have Harmed, Corrupted And Ruined, We Have Made Mistakes And Deceived.

-John Le Carre

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Our Power Knows No

John Le Carre

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Our Power Knows No Limits, Yet We Cannot Find Food For A Starving Child, Or A Home For A Refugee. Our Knowledge Is Without Measure And We Build The Weapons That Will Destroy Us. We Live On The Edge Of Ourselves, Terrified Of The Darkness Within. We Have Harmed, Corrupted And Ruined, We Have Made Mistakes And Deceived.

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A Good Writer Is An Expert On Nothing Except Himself. And On That Subject, If He Is Wise, He Holds His Tongue.

If There Is One Eternal Truth Of Politics, It Is That There Are Always A Dozen Good Reasons For Doing Nothing.

I Had Two Experiences Of Criminality: One Was My Conman Father, The Other Was Teaching At Eton

A Spy, Like A Writer, Lives Outside The Mainstream Population. He Steals His Experience Through Bribes And Reconstructs It.

Thank Heaven, Though, One Of The Few Mistakes I Haven't Made Is To Talk About The Unwritten Book.

George Smiley: [quoting An Old Letter From Bill Haydon About Jim Prideaux] He Has That Heavy Quiet That Commands. He's My Other Half. Between Us We'd Make One Marvelous Man. He Asks Nothing Better Than To Be In My Company Or That Of My Wicked, Divine Friends, And I'm Vastly Tickled By The Compliment. He's Virgin, About Eight Foot Tall, And Built By The Same Firm That Did Stonehenge

In The Last 15 Or 20 Years, I've Watched The British Press Simply Go To Hell. There Seems To Be No Limit, No Depths To Which The Tabloids Won't Sink. I Don't Know Who These People Are But They're Little Pigs.

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 Old We May Become. To Pretend Otherwise Is To Cheat.

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 To Lose.

Survival...is An Infinite Capacity For Suspicion.

Luck's Just Another Word For Destiny... Either You Make Your Own Or You're Screwed.

There's One Thing Worse Than Change And That's The Status Quo.

There Will Be No War, But In The Pursuit Of Principle No Stone Will Be Left Standing.

But There Is A Big Difference In Working For The West And Working For A Totalitarian State.

The Trouble Is, When Professional Spies Go Out Of Their Way To Make A Definitive Statement About One Of Their Own, The Public Tends To Believe The Opposite: Which Puts Us All Back Where We Started.

God Is In His Heaven And The First Night Was A Wow.

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.

Gerald Westerby, He Told Himself. You Were Present At Your Birth. You Were Present At Your Several Marriages And At Some Of Your Divorces, And You Will Certainly Be Present At Your Funeral. High Time, In Our Considered View, That You Were Present At Certain Other Crucial Moments In Your History.

I Mean, You Can't Be Less Ruthless Than The Opposition Simply Because Your Government's Policy Is Benevolent, Can You Now?

Having Your Book Turned Into A Movie Is Like Seeing Your Oxen Turned Into Bouillon Cubes.

It Was Man Who Ended The Cold War In Case You Didn't Notice. It Wasn't Weaponry, Or Technology, Or Armies Or Campaigns. It Was Just Man. Not Even Western Man Either, As It Happened, But Our Sworn Enemy In The East, Who Went Into The Streets, Faced The Bullets And The Batons And Said: We've Had Enough. It Was Their Emperor, Not Ours, Who Had The Nerve To Mount The Rostrum And Declare He Had No Clothes. And The Ideologies Trailed After These Impossible Events Like Condemned Prisoners, As Ideologies Do When They've Had Their Day.

For Better Or Worse, I've Been Involved In The Description Of Political Conflict.

Each My Book Feels Like My Last Book. And Then I Think, Like A Dedicated Alcoholic, That One More Won't Do Me Any Harm.

Elections Are A Western Jerk-off.

By The Age Of 9 Or 10, I Knew That I Had To Cut My Own Cloth And Make My Own Way.

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, Of The Secrecy And The Misinformation Which Is The Digest Of Our News.

The One Thing You Can Bet Is That Spying Is Never Over. Spying Is Like The Wiring In This Building: It's Just A Question Of Who Takes It Over And Switches On The Lights. It Will Go On And On And On.

[my Novels] Introduce Levels Of Intelligence ... Moral Doubt [and] Self-doubt, Which May Not Pertain [to Real-world Espionage].

My Definition Of A Decent Society Is One That First Of All Takes Care Of Its Losers, And Protects Its Weak. What I See In My Country, Progressively Over These Years, Is That The Rich Have Got Richer, The Poor Have Got Poorer. The Rich Have Become Indifferent Through A Philosophy Of Greed, And The Poorer Have Become Hopeless Because They're Not Properly Cared For. That's Actually Something That Is Happening In Many Western Societies. Your Own, I Am Told, Is Not Free From It.

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.

...also Took For Granted That Secret Services Were The Only Real Measure Of A Nations Political Health, The Only Real Expression Of Its Subconscious.

The More Identities A Man Has, The More They Express The Person They Conceal.

Those Who Are Not With Mr. Bush Are Against Him. Worse, They Are With The Enemy. Which Is Odd, Because I'm Dead Against Bush, But I Would Love To See Saddam's Downfall -- Just Not On Bush's Terms And Not By His Methods. And Not Under The Banner Of Such Outrageous Hypocrisy.

Home's Where You Go When You Run Out Of Homes.

The Good Pupils Are Often Brilliant, And They Keep You On Your Toes And Take You To The Limits Of Your Knowledge. The Worst Pupils Provide A Unique Insight Into The Criminal Mind.

The Cold War Was Over Long Before It Was Officially Declared Dead.

During The Cold War, We Lived In Coded Times When It Wasn't Easy And There Were Shades Of Grey And Ambiguity.

The Fact That You Can Only Do A Little Is No Excuse For Doing Nothing.

Never Trade A Secret, You'll Always Get The Short End Of The Bargain.

I Once Heard Someone Say Morality Was Method. Do You Hold With That? I Suppose You Wouldn't. You Would Say That Morality Was Vested In The Aim, I Expect. Difficult To Know What One's Aims Are, That's The Trouble, Specially If You're British.

Sometimes We Have To Do A Thing In Order To Find Out The Reason For It. Sometimes Our Actions Are Questions, Not Answers.

When It Comes To Recruiting People For The Secret World, What The Recruiters Are Looking For Is Pretty Much What I Had. I Was Unanchored, Looking For An Institution To Look After Me. I Had A Bit Of Larceny. I Understood Larceny. I Understood The Natural Criminality In People - Because It Was - It Was All Around Me. And I Have No Doubt There Was A Chunk Of It Inside Me Too. Once I Found That Identity, It Took Root In Me. It Exactly - It Gelled With The World That I'd Known In The Past.

I Don't Think That There Are Very Many Good Writers Who Don't Live Without A Sense Of Tension. If They Haven't Got One Immediately Available To Them, Then They Usually Manage To Manufacture It In Their Private Lives.

Our Power Knows No Limits, Yet We Cannot Find Food For A Starving Child, Or A Home For A Refugee. Our Knowledge Is Without Measure And We Build The Weapons That Will Destroy Us. We Live On The Edge Of Ourselves, Terrified Of The Darkness Within. We Have Harmed, Corrupted And Ruined, We Have Made Mistakes And Deceived.

The Only Reward For Love Is The Experience Of Loving.

It's Death, That's What I'm Suffering From. The Systematic Encroachment Of The Big D.

Multi-billion-dollar Multinational Corporations View The Exploitation Of The World's Sick And Dying As A Sacred Duty To Their Shareholders.

It Is Also The Pardonable Vanity Of Lonely People Everywhere To Assume That They Have No Counterparts.

There Is A Big Difference Between Fighting The Cold War And Fighting Radical Islam. The Rules Have Changed And We Haven't.

He Has The Gift Of Quiet.

Completing A Book, It's A Little Like Having A Baby.... There's A Feeling Of Relief And Satisfaction When You Get To The End. A Feeling That You Have Brought Your Family, Your Characters, Home. Then A Sort Of Post-natal Depression And Then, Very Quickly, The Horizon Of A New Book. The Consolation That Next Time I Will Do It Better.

In Itself, The Practice Of Deception Is Not Particularly Exacting; It Is A Matter Of Experience, Of Professional Expertise, It Is A Facility Most Of Us Can Acquire.

The Cat Sat On The Mat Is Not A Story. The Cat Sat On The Other Cat’s Mat Is A Story.

And The Ideologies Trailed After These Impossible Events Like Condemned Prisoners, As Ideologies Do When They've Had Their Day. Because They Have No Heart Of Their Own. They're The Whores And Angels Of Our Striving Selves.

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 Coming From And They're Also Relying Tremendously On The Creative Imagination Of The Reader.

I've Always Had Difficulties With Female Characters.

There Is No Such Thing As A Secure Writer: Every Novel Is An Impossible Mountain.

Let's Die Of It Before We're Too Old.

As Our Governments Spin, Lie And Lose Their Credibility, The Electorate Simply Shrugs And Looks The Other Way.

I Grew Up In A Completely Bookless Household. It Was My Father's Boast That He Had Never Read A Book From End To End. I Don't Remember Any Of His Ladies Being Bookish. So I Was Entirely Dependent On My Schoolteachers For My Early Reading With The Exception Of The Wind In The Willows, Which A Stepmother Read To Me When I Was In Hospital.

Cheats, Liars And Criminals May Resist Every Blandishment While Respectable Gentlemen Have Been Moved To Appalling Treasons By Watery Cabbage In A Departmental Canteen.

The Religious Cant That Will Send American Troops Into Battle Is Perhaps The Most Sickening Aspect Of This Surreal War-to-be. Bush Has An Arm-lock On God. And God Has Very Particular Political Opinions. God Appointed America To Save The World In Any Way That Suits America. God Appointed Israel To Be The Nexus Of America's Middle Eastern Policy, And Anyone Who Wants To Mess With That Idea Is A) Anti-semitic, B) Anti-american, C) With The Enemy, And D) A Terrorist.

Ideologies Have No Heart Of Their Own. They're The Whores And Angels Of Our Striving Selves.

It Was A Charming Fantasy Of Romantics That The Spies Would Stop Spying, That Political Conflict Would End And Politicians Would Tell The Truth. Unfortunately That Has Not Been The Case.

Love Means Having Something To Betray.

I Can't Think Of Anybody Worse To Live With.

We Have Learned In Recent Years To Translate Almost All Of Political Life In Terms Of Conspiracy. And The Spy Novel, As Never Before, Really, Has Come Into Its Own.

Remember Graham Green's Dictum That Childhood Is The Bank Balance Of The Writer? I Think That All Writers Feel Alienated. Most Of Us Go Back To An Alienated Childhood In Some Way Or Another. I Know That I Do.

Tyranny Is Like The Electric Wiring In An Old House. A Tyrant Dies, The New Tyrant Takes Possession, And All He Has To Do Is Drop The Switch.

People Like You Should Be Stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' She Mused Aloud, With A Puzzled Shake Of Her Wise Head. 'you Think You're Solving The World's Problems But Actually You're The Problem.

What Else Has A Journalist To Do These Days, After All, But Report Life's Miseries?

The Cold War Provided The Perfect Excuse For Western Governments To Plunder And Exploit The Third World In The Name Of Freedom; To Rig Its Elections, Bribe Its Politicians, Appoint Its Tyrants And, By Every Sophisticated Means Of Persuasion And Interference, Stunt The Emergence Of Young Democracies In The Name Of Democracy.

Power Expands Through The Distribution Of Secrecy.

In The Hands Of Politicians Grand Designs Achieve Nothing But New Forms Of The Old Misery.

More Particularly, Having A Largely German-oriented Education Has Made Me Very Responsive To 19th-century German Literature.

Let's All Pretend To Be Someone Else, And Then Perhaps We'll Find Out Who We Are.

My Definition Of A Decent Society Is One That First Of All Takes Care Of Its Losers, And Protects Its Weak.

Why Did I Desert Labour? Total Bloody Disillusionment. The Party Was A Corpse. It Had No Ideology, It Became Detached, Old, Spineless And Needed To Go.

Disillusionment

We Lie To One Another Every Day, In The Sweetest Way, Often Unconsciously. We Dress Ourselves And Compose Ourselves In Order To Present Ourselves To One Another.

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.

Writing Is Like Walking In A Deserted Street. Out Of The Dust In The Street You Make A Mud Pie.

It's A Principle Of Mine To Come Into The Story As Late As Possible, And To Tell It As Fast As You Can.

You Can't Make War Against Terror. Terror Is A Technique Of Battle. It's A Tactic That Has Been Employed Since Time Immemorial. You Can Conduct Clandestine Action Against Terrorists, And That Must Be Done.

I Move My Lips When I Read -- I'm Painfully Slow -- So I Like Really Good English.

The Things That Are Done In The Name Of The Shareholder Are, To Me, As Terrifying As The Things That Are Done - Dare I Say It - In The Name Of God.

For All The Flailing And Huffing And Puffing, There Is A Kind Of Fatality About The Process Of War-making And The Excuses We Find For It, The Consolation Of Belligerence In Politics.

Only Esmeralda Was Not Weeping. Instead She Wore That Wooden Look That Whites Mistake For Churlishenss Or Indifference. Woodrew Knew It Was Neither. It Was Familiarity. This How Real Life Is Constituted, It Said. This Is Grief And Hatred And People Hacked To Death. This Is The Everyday We Have Known Since We Were Born And You Wazungu Have Not.

It's The Oldest Question Of All, George. Who Can Spy On The Spies?

If You See The World As Gloomily As I See It, The Only Thing To Do Is Laugh Or Shoot Yourself.

In Every War Zone That I've Been In, There Has Been A Reality And Then There Has Been The Public Perception Of Why The War Was Being Fought. In Every Crisis, The Issues Have Been Far More Complex Than The Public Has Been Allowed To Know.

Out Of Date, Perhaps, But Who Wasn't These Days? Out Of Date, But Loyal To His Own Time. At A Certain Moment, After All, Every Man Chooses: Will He Go Forward, Will He Go Back? There Was Nothing Dishounorable In Not Being Blown About By Every Little Modern Wind. Better To Have Worth, To Entrench, To Be An Oak Of One's Own Generation.

A Committee Is An Animal With Four Back Legs.

All Men Are Born Free: Just Not For Long.

I Mean, I'm In The Business Of Storytelling, Not Message Making.

There Are Some Subjects That Can Only Be Tackled In Fiction.

The Monsters Of Our Childhood Do Not Fade Away, Neither Are They Ever Wholly Monstrous.

When You're My Age, You Have The Feeling Sometimes That You're Seeing The Show Come Round Again.

You Have No Idea How Humiliating It Was, As A Boy, To Suddenly Have All Your Clothes, Your Toys, Snatched By The Bailiff. I Mean We Were A Middle-class Family, It's Not As If It Was Happening Up And Down The Street. It Made Me Ashamed, I Felt Dirty.

Life Was To Be A Search, Or Nothing! But It Was The Fear That It Was Nothing That Drove Me Forward. Every Encounter Was An Encounter With Myself.

Treason Is Very Much A Matter Of Habit, Smiley Decided.

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.

There Was Nothing Dishonourable In Not Being Blown About By Every Little Modern Wind. Better To Have Worth, To Entrench, To Be An Oak Of One's Own Generation.

I Made A Series Of Wrong Decisions About Moderately Recent Books, And I've Sold The Rights To Studios For Ridiculous Amounts Of Money And The Films Have Never Been Made. That's The Saddest Thing Of All, Because They're Locked Up And No-one Else Can Make Them.

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 Centre Of Things.

You Should Have Died When I Killed You.

A Good Man Knows When To Sacrifice Himself, A Bad Man Survives But Loses His Soul.

When It's Going Well [writing] Goes Terribly Fast. It Isn't At All Surprising To Write A Chapter In A Day, Which For Me Is About Twenty-two Pages. When It's Going Badly, It Isn't Really Going Badly; It's Just The Beginning.

I Don't Think It Is Given To Any Of Us To Be Impertinent To Great Religions With Impunity.

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.

The Pharmaceutical Corporations Are Engaged In The Systematic Corruption Of The Medical Profession, Country By Country

I Think The Greatest Single Enemy Is The Misuse Of Information, The Perversion Of Truth In The Hands Of Terribly Skillful People.

Blackmail Is More Effective Than Bribery.

A Desk Is A Dangerous Place From Which To View The World.

I've Got More Than One String To My Bow, And I Thought I'd Give This One A Twang.

Completing A Book, It's A Little Like Having A Baby.

On One Hand We Go Like Hell For Every Terror Cell We Can Find, We Penetrate It, We Destroy It. On The Other Hand, There Is A Much Bigger Need For A Political Solution.

Unfortunately It Is The Weak Who Destroy The Strong.

Most Of Us Live In A Condition Of Secrecy: Secret Desires, Secret Appetites, Secret Hatreds And Relationship With The Institutions Which Is Extremely Intense And Uncomfortable. These Are, To Me, A Part Of The Ordinary Human Condition. So I Don't Think I'm Writing About Abnormal Things. ... Artists, In My Experience, Have Very Little Center. They Fake. They Are Not The Real Thing. They Are Spies. I Am No Exception.

I Used To Think It Was Clever To Confuse Comedy With Tragedy. Now I Wish I Could Distinguish Them.

I Think I'm In The Same Mood As Ever, But In Some Ways More Mature. I Guess You Could Say That, At 65, When You've Seen The World Shape Up As I Have, There Are Only Two Things You Can Do: Laugh Or Kill Yourself.

I Think That Where I've Watched A Movie Go Wrong, It's Usually Because The Dread Committee Has Been Interfering With It.

Coming Home From Very Lonely Places, All Of Us Go A Little Mad: Whether From Great Personal Success, Or Just An All-night Drive, We Are The Sole Survivors Of A World No One Else Has Ever Seen.

Congratulations

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.

Every Writer Knows He Is Spurious; Every Fiction Writer Would Rather Be Credible Than Authentic.

Fiction Writers

A Lot Of People See Doubt As Legitimate Philosophical Posture. They Think Of Themselves In The Middle, Whereas Of Course Really, They're Nowhere.

Jesus Christ Only Had Twelve, You Know, And One Of Them Was A Double.

Everyone Who Is Not Happy Must Be Shot.

I'm Really A Library Man, Or Second-hand Book Man.

Wives?" She Asked, Interrupting Him. For A Moment, He Had Assumed She Was Tuning To The Novel. Then He Saw Her Waiting, Suspicious Eyes, So He Replied Cautiously, "none Active," As If Wives Were Volcanoes.

Give A Man A Car Of His Own And He Leaves Humility And Common Sense Behind Him In The Garage.

America Has Entered One Of Its Periods Of Historic Madness, But This Is The Worst I Can Remember.

The Longing We Have To Communicate Cleanly And Directly With People Is Always Obstructed By Qualifications And Often With Concern About How Our Messages Will Be Received.

I Think That Most Of My Books Are Part Of Some Process Of Self-education, Often About The Places I Go To. Most Of All, They Are About The Peculiar Tension Between Institutional Loyalty And Loyalty To Oneself; The Mystery Of Patriotism, For A Brit Of My Age And Generation, Where It Runs, How It Should Be Defined, What It's Worth And What A Corrupting Force It Can Be When Misapplied. All That Stuff Is Just In Me And It Comes Out In The Characters. I Don't Mean To Preach, But I Know I Do, And I'm A Very Flawed Person. It's Quite Ridiculous.

Most People Like To Read About Intrigue And Spies. I Hope To Provide A Metaphor For The Average Reader's Daily Life. Most Of Us Live In A Slightly Conspiratorial Relationship With Our Employer And Perhaps With Our Marriage.

People Are Very Secretive - Secret Even From Themselves.

I Happen To Write By Hand. I Don't Even Type.

Without A Pen In My Hand I Can't Think.

By Repetition, Each Lie Becomes An Irreversible Fact Upon Which Other Lies Are Constructed.

To Possess Another Language, Charlemagne Tells Us, Is To Possess Another Soul. German Is Such A Language. Once You Have It In Your Head, You Can Go There Anytime, You Can Close The Door, You Have A Refuge.

Agents Of Disruption, Subversion, Sabotage And Disinformation Tunnelers And Smugglers, Listeners And Forgers, Trainers And Recruiters And Talent Spotters And Couriers And Watchers And Seducers, Assassins And Balloonists, Lip Readers And Disguise Artists.

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. Fifty Years On, I Don't Associate The Book With Anything That Ever Happened To Me, Save For One Wordless Encounter At London Airport When A Worn-out, Middle-aged Military Kind Of Man In A Stained Raincoat Slammed A Handful Of Mixed Foreign Change On To The Bar And In Gritty Irish Accents Ordered Himself As Much Scotch As It Would Buy. In That Moment, Alec Leamas Was Born. Or So My Memory, Not Always A Reliable Informant, Tells Me.

There Is A Terrible Alienation In The Ordinary Man Between What He Is Being Told And What He Secretly Believes.

For Decades To Come The Spy World Will Continue To Be The Collective Couch Where The Subconscious Of Each Nation Is Confessed.

I've Never Been Able To Write A Book Without One Very Strong Character In My Rucksack.

I Think That All Writers Feel Alienated. ... I Know That I Do. ... I Still Feel, As I Think Most Creative People Do, Absolutely Isolated.

Smiley Was Soaked To The Skin And God As A Punishment Had Removed All Taxis From The Face Of London.

Look... We're Getting To Be Old Men, And We've Spent Our Lives Looking For The Weaknesses In One Another's Systems. I Can See Through Eastern Values Just As You Can See Through Our Western Ones. Both Of Us, I Am Sure, Have Experienced Ad Nauseam The Technical Satisfactions Of This Wretched War. But Now Your Own Side Is Going To Shoot You. Don't You Think It's Time To Recognise That There Is As Little Worth On Your Side As There Is On Mine?

To Possess Another Language Is To Possess Another Soul.

The World Of Spying Is My Genre. My Struggle Is To Demystify, To De-romanticise The Spook World, But At The Same Time Harness It As A Good Story.

All Power Corrupts But Some Must Govern.

When The World Is Destroyed, It Will Be Destroyed Not By Its Madmen But By The Sanity Of Its Experts And The Superior Ignorance Of Its Bureaucrats.

After All, If You Make Your Enemy Look Like A Fool, You Lose The Justification For Engaging Him.

People Who've Had Very Unhappy Childhoods Are Pretty Good At Inventing Themselves. If Nobody Invents You For Yourself, Nothing Is Left But To Invent Yourself For Others.

Unhappy Childhood

It's Easy To Forget What Intelligence Consists Of: Luck And Speculation. Here And There A Windfall, Here And There A Scoop.

No Problem Exists In Isolation, One Must First Reduce It To Its Basic Components, Then Tackle Each Component In Turn.

The Secret Intelligence Service I Knew Occupied Dusky Suites Of Little Rooms Opposite St James's Park Tube Station In London.

Intelligence Services

I Think Bankers Will Always Get Away With Whatever They Can Get Away With.

Americans Believe That If You Know Something, You Should Do Something About It.

I Worked For Mi6 In The Sixties, During The Great Witch-hunts, When The Shared Paranoia Of The Cold War Gripped The Services.

I Taught Principally German Language And Literature At Eton. But Any Master With Private Pupils Must Be Prepared To Teach Anything They Ask For. That Can Be As Diverse As The Early Paintings Of Salvador Dali Or How Bumblebees Manage To Fly.

German Language

I Am Still Making Order Out Of Chaos By Reinvention.

The Greatest Threat To Mankind Comes From The Renunciation Of Individual Scruple In Favor Of Institutional Denominators. . . . Real Heroism Lies, As It Always Will, Not In Conformity Or Even Patriotism, But In Acts Of Solitary Moral Courage. Which, Come To Think Of It, Is What We Used To Admire In Our Christian Savior

I Grew Up In A Completely Bookless Household. It Was My Father's Boast That He Had Never Read A Book From End To End.

There Are Moments Which Are Made Up Of Too Much Stuff For Them To Be Lived At The Time They Occur.

Fools, Most Linguists. Damn All To Say In One Language, So They Learn Another And Say Damn All In That.

America Has Entered One Of Its Periods Of Historical Madness, But This Is The Worst I Can Remember: Worse Than Mccarthyism, Worse Than The Bay Of Pigs And In The Long Term Potentially More Disastrous Than The Vietnam War.

I Was The British Spy Who Had Come Out Of The Woodwork And Told It How It Really Was, And Anything I Said To The Contrary Only Enforced The Myth. And Since I Was Writing For A Public Hooked On Bond And Desperate For The Antidote, The Myth Stuck.

Yet It's Not For Want Of Future That I'm Here, He Thought. It's For Want Of A Present.

Love Is Whatever You Can Still Betray. Betrayal Can Only Happen If You Love.

Once You've Lived The Inside-out World Of Espionage, You Never Shed It. It's A Mentality, A Double Standard Of Existence.

Double Standard

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 Intelligence For His Masters, Whether It's His Readership Or His Spy Masters. And I Think That Both Professions Are Perhaps Rather Lonely.

I Don't Know Whether It's Age Or Maturity, But I Certainly Find Myself Committed More And More To The Looser Forms Of Western Democracy At Any Price.

It Struck Him As A Bit Unfair That, At The Age Of Eight, He Should Have Manifested The Same Sense Of Solitude That Haunted Him At Forty-three.

What Do You Think Spies Are: Priests, Saints And Martyrs? They're A Squalid Procession Of Vain Fools, Traitors Too, Yes; Pansies, Sadists And Drunkards, People Who Play Cowboys And Indians To Brighten Their Rotten Lives.

When A Problem Threatens To Engulf You, There's Nothing Like Irrelevant Detail To Keep Your Head Above Water.

A Good Writer Can Watch A Cat Pad Across The Street And Know What It Is To Be Pounced Upon By A Bengal Tiger.

How Bush And His Junta Succeeded In Deflecting America's Anger From Bin Laden To Saddam Hussein Is One Of The Great Public Relations Conjuring Tricks Of History. But They Swung It. A Recent Poll Tells Us That One In Two Americans Now Believe Saddam Was Responsible For The Attack On The World Trade Centre.

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