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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.
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
Life
Bliss
Absolutely
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Quite
Fatherhood
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Domestic
More quotes by John le Carre
Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.
John le Carre
Agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation tunnelers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip readers and disguise artists.
John le Carre
...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
Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.
John le Carre
Love means having something to betray.
John le Carre
The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
John le Carre
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
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.
John le Carre
There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.
John le Carre
It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
John le Carre
Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.
John le Carre
Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishounorable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.
John le Carre
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
All power corrupts but some must govern.
John le Carre
Home's where you go when you run out of homes.
John le Carre
Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
John le Carre
The greatest threat to mankind comes from the renunciation of individual scruple in favor of institutional denominators. . . . Real heroism lies, as it always will, not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage. Which, come to think of it, is what we used to admire in our Christian savior
John le Carre
In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire.
John le Carre
I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
