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

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As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
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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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...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.
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Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
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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.
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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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I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
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It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
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Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.
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On one hand we go like hell for every terror cell we can find, we penetrate it, we destroy it. On the other hand, there is a much bigger need for a political solution.
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I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
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All power corrupts but some must govern.
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Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
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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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It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
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For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
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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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But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
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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 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.
John le Carre