Quote

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.

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
Went
Immoral
Rather
Quantum
Every
Suspects
Smiley
Things
Centre
Lavish
Never
Cat
Stray
Concern
Spy
Compassion
Lightly
Theory
Suspect

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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.
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Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time.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.
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The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
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There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
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When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
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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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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.
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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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Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
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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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You should have died when I killed you.
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For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.
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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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The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God.
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It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
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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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People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem.
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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.
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Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
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