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.
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.
The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
People are very secretive – secret even from themselves.
The pharmaceutical corporations are engaged in the systematic corruption of the medical profession, country by country.
Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.
A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue.
There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
I’m really a library man, or second-hand book man.
I can’t think of anybody worse to live with.
I move my lips when I read – I’m painfully slow – so I like really good English.
Power expands through the distribution of secrecy.
Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
It’s the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
Completing a book, it’s a little like having a baby.
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.
Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.
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.
When a problem threatens to engulf you, there’s nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.