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I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British.

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
Expect
Specially
Wouldn
Vested
Hold
Aims
Trouble
Aim
Heard
Suppose
Difficult
British
Someone
Method
Would
Morality

More quotes by John le Carre

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He has the gift of quiet.
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A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.
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I mean, you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?
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I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
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The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.
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If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
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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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Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.
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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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I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
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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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America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
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All power corrupts but some must govern.
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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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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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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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I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.
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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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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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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
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