A committee is an animal with four back legs.
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 had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton.
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.
He has the gift of quiet.
Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.
The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.
Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.
Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.
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.
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.
Yet it’s not for want of future that I’m here, he thought. It’s for want of a present.
I’ve always had difficulties with female characters.
If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they’re nowhere.
What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life’s miseries?
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.
After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.
God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow.