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The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
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
Littles
Little
Nothing
Excuse
Fact
Facts
More quotes by John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
John le Carre
Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.
John le Carre
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
There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
John le Carre
You should have died when I killed you.
John le Carre
In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
John le Carre
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.
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Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time.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
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
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
I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
John le Carre
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
But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
John le Carre
All men are born free: just not for long.
John le Carre
Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
John le Carre
What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
John le Carre
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
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
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.
John le Carre
