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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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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
Literature
Spy
Term
Conspiracy
Political
Recent
Come
Translate
Years
Terms
Really
Novel
Never
Learned
Life
Almost

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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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There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
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The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.
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Those who are not with Mr. Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall -- just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.
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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.
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Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.
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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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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
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Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.
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The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
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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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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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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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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.
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Love means having something to betray.
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Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
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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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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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I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
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