The Pigeon Tunnel Quotes

“These are true stories told from memory – to which you are entitled to ask, what is truth, and what is memory to a creative writer in what we may delicately call the evening of his life? To the lawyer, truth is facts unadorned. Whether such facts are ever findable is another matter. To the creative writer, fact is raw material, not his taskmaster but his instrument, and his job is to make it sing. Real truth lies, if anywhere, not in facts, but in nuance.”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life: NOW A MAJOR APPLE TV MOTION PICTURE

“[A]n old writer’s memory is the whore of his imagination. We all reinvent our pasts, I said, but writers are in a class of their own.”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life

“Germany’s emergence as a self-confident, non-aggressive, democratic power – not to speak of the humanitarian example it has set – is a pill too bitter for many of us Brits to swallow. That is a sadness that I have regretted for far too long.”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life: NOW A MAJOR APPLE TV MOTION PICTURE

“What in Britain is called the Special Relationship, in Germany is called treason.”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life: NOW A MAJOR APPLE TV MOTION PICTURE

“when we buried the hatchet we always remembered where we’d put it.”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life

“Nobody can do corporate rot more discreetly than the spies. Nobody does better mission creep. Nobody knows better how to create an image of mysterious omniscience and hide behind it. Nobody does a better job of pretending to be a cut above a public that has no choice but to pay top price for second-rate intelligence whose lure lies in the gothic secrecy of its procurement, rather than its intrinsic worth.”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life

“and the wood smoke will roll out of the fireplace on to the carpet we paid too much for on that rainy afternoon in Interlaken in the snowless winter of whenever it was,”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life: NOW A MAJOR APPLE TV MOTION PICTURE

“has delegated swathes of its own foreign policy to its spies, a thing the United States has done rather too frequently in recent years.”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life: NOW A MAJOR APPLE TV MOTION PICTURE

“Para un escritor de ficción, los hechos son la materia prima, no su guía, sino su instrumento, y su labor consiste en arrancarle música.”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life

“Como fabricante de ficciones, invento visiones de mí mismo y nunca cuento la verdad, si es que tal cosa existe”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life

“Even when we convince ourselves that we are being dispassionate, sticking to the bald facts with no self-serving decorations or omissions, pure memory remains as elusive as a bar of wet soap.”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life

“Quirinal.”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life

“Hugh Trevor-Roper,”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life

“Ben Macintyre’s”
― John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life