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It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three.

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
Unfair
Forty
Solitude
Eight
Bits
Manifested
Age
Haunted
Sense
Three
Struck

More quotes by John le Carre

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I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.
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Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.
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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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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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It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
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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.
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In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.
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Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.
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All power corrupts but some must govern.
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Love means having something to betray.
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I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
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Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
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When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.
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I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.
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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.
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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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I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.
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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.
John le Carre
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You should have died when I killed you.
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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.
John le Carre