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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
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
Population
Outside
Writer
Bribes
Literature
Bribe
Lives
Steals
Experience
Spy
Like
Mainstream
Stealing
More quotes by John le Carre
I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no-one else can make them.
John le Carre
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
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
What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
John le Carre
It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
John le Carre
The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
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
You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
John le Carre
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
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.
John le Carre
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
John le Carre
I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
John le Carre
Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
John le Carre
There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
John le Carre
For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
John le Carre
The greatest threat to mankind comes from the renunciation of individual scruple in favor of institutional denominators. . . . Real heroism lies, as it always will, not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage. Which, come to think of it, is what we used to admire in our Christian savior
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
