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I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.

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
Father
Ends
Book
Never
Boast
Household
Completely
Grew
Read

More quotes by John le Carre

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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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There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
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It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three.
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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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America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
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When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.
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As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
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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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Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.
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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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You should have died when I killed you.
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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.
John le Carre
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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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Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
John le Carre
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Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
John le Carre
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There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
John le Carre
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What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.
John le Carre
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He has the gift of quiet.
John le Carre
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Those who are not with Mr. Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall -- just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.
John le Carre
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In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.
John le Carre