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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
Watched
Usually
Movie
Wrong
Interfering
Think
Committee
Thinking
Committees
Interfere
Dread

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You should have died when I killed you.
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There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
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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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People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem.
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For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
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Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
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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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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've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
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It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
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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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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.
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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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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
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There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
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We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
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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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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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More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
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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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