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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

More quotes by John le Carre

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I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
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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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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.
John le Carre
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Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
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Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.
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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.
John le Carre
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Every writer knows he is spurious every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
John le Carre
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The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
John le Carre
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Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
John le Carre
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And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day. Because they have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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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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.
John le Carre
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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
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I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
John le Carre