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A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.

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
Way
Dead
Men
Worst
Love
Ways
Enemy
Absolution
Alive
Alter
Asks
Beaten
Thought
Regret
Power
Late

More quotes by John le Carre

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I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no-one else can make them.
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All men are born free: just not for long.
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The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God.
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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.
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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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I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
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In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
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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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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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The greatest threat to mankind comes from the renunciation of individual scruple in favor of institutional denominators. . . . Real heroism lies, as it always will, not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage. Which, come to think of it, is what we used to admire in our Christian savior
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Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.
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Every writer knows he is spurious every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
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The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.
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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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Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.
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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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The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
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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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I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
John le Carre
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Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.
John le Carre