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I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with 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
Movie
Wrong
Interfering
Think
Committee
Thinking
Committees
Interfere
Dread
Watched
Usually

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I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
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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.
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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.
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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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What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
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I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.
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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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The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
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A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.
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For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.
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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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Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
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We've had enough. He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. We've had a bellyful, in fact. And like everyone who's had enough, said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, he wants more.
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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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I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
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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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More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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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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Home's where you go when you run out of homes.
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