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The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.

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
Struggle
Story
Stories
Good
Time
Spook
World
Spying
Harness
Genre

More quotes by John le Carre

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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.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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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Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.
John le Carre
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I think that all writers feel alienated. ... I know that I do. ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated.
John le Carre
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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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I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.
John le Carre
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Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
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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It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
John le Carre
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When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly it's just the beginning.
John le Carre
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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
John le Carre
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Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
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.
John le Carre
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Every writer knows he is spurious every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
John le Carre
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Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
John le Carre
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I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
John le Carre