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

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But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
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Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.
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There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
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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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I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.
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Agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation tunnelers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip readers and disguise artists.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
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Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
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Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
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What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day. Because they have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.
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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.
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I think that all writers feel alienated. ... I know that I do. ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated.
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In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
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In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.
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