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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.
John le Carre
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John le Carre
Age: 89 †
Born: 1931
Born: October 19
Died: 2020
Died: December 12
Actor
Film Producer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Spy
Writer
Sweetwater
Texas
David John Moore Cornwell
David Cornwell
John le Carre
Think
Lies
Thinking
Writer
Relationship
Call
Lying
Pursuer
Whether
Quarry
Might
Spy
Real
Tension
More quotes by John le Carre
There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.
John le Carre
Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time.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.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
John le Carre
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
The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
John le Carre
I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
John le Carre
Home's where you go when you run out of homes.
John le Carre
There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
John le Carre
