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A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.

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
Courses
Course
Posture
Really
Legitimate
Think
Nowhere
Thinking
Whereas
People
Philosophical
Doubt
Middle

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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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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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All men are born free: just not for long.
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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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Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.
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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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I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
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The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy.
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There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
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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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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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I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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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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I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.
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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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For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
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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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...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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The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
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