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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
Usually
Movie
Wrong
Interfering
Think
Committee
Thinking
Committees
Interfere
Dread
Watched

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Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
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I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
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For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
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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 think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
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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.
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Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
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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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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.
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You should have died when I killed you.
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
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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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Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.
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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.
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I mean, you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?
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I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.
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Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
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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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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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