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All men are born free: just not for long.

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
Free
Born
Long
Men

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Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.
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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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Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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We've had enough. He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. We've had a bellyful, in fact. And like everyone who's had enough, said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, he wants more.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
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In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
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Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.
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More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
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Wives? she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, None active, as if wives were volcanoes.
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Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch.
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What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.
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Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
John le Carre
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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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There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
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