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

More quotes by John le Carre

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Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
John le Carre
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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
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I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
John le Carre
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It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.
John le Carre
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I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
John le Carre
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All men are born free: just not for long.
John le Carre
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Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
John le Carre
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The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.
John le Carre
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...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.
John le Carre
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It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
John le Carre
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Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.
John le Carre
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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
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The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God.
John le Carre
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I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
John le Carre
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We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
John le Carre
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Love means having something to betray.
John le Carre
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I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.
John le Carre
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Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch.
John le Carre