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Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

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
Existence
Espionage
Never
Mentality
World
Double
Shed
Standard
Standards
Lived
Inside

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When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
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Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.
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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
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When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.
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It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
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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.
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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 think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
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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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There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.
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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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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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I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
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The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
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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.
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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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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.
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More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
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A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.
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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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