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More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

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
Largely
German
Particularly
Century
Education
Literature
Made
Responsive
Oriented

More quotes by John le Carre

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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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In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
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Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.
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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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For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
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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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Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.
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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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What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
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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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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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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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As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
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