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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
Relationship
Call
Lying
Pursuer
Whether
Quarry
Might
Spy
Real
Tension
Think
Lies
Thinking
Writer

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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.
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For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.
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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.
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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.
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If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
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Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
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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.
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The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.
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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.
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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.
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All men are born free: just not for long.
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I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
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It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
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I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
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He has the gift of quiet.
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Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.
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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.
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I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British.
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I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
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In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
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