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.
People are very secretive - secret even from themselves.
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.
I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.
Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.
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
[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.
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.
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.
Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.
I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.
For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.
Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
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.
Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.
I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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.
No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn.
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.
In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
All men are born free: just not for long.
I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.
There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.
A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
Blackmail is more effective than bribery.
But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
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.
When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.
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.
Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
You should have died when I killed you.
I can't think of anybody worse to live with.
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.
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 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.
Without a pen in my hand I can't think.
My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.
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.
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.
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.
Love means having something to betray.
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.
A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue.
After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.
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.
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.
There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.
Multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world's sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders.
Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.
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.
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.
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.
There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.
A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.
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.
Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.
It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
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.
America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.
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.
There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo.
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.
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 desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.
If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
Power expands through the distribution of secrecy.
He has the gift of quiet.
What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous.
By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.
The only reward for love is the experience of loving.
The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are.
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.
The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle no stone will be left standing.
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.
I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
I've always had difficulties with female characters.
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.
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.
I think that all writers feel alienated. ... I know that I do. ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated.
A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.
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.
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.
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.
All power corrupts but some must govern.
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
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.
Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.
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.
By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.
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.
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.
I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
A committee is an animal with four back legs.
When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
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.
Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.
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.
