Quote

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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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
Children
Within
Mistakes
Deceived
Made
Knowledge
Limits
Starving
Cannot
Weapons
Ruined
Power
Build
Terrified
Home
Darkness
Edge
Find
Food
Edges
Harmed
Live
Mistake
Measure
Corrupted
Without
Child
Destroy
Refugee

More quotes by John le Carre

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All men are born free: just not for long.
John le Carre
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I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
John le Carre
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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.
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Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
John le Carre
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I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
John le Carre
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Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
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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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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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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
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I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.
John le Carre
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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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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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Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
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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There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
John le Carre
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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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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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But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
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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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