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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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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
Nothing
Politicians
Forms
Misery
Politician
Design
Achieve
Hands
Designs
Form
Grand

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Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.
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I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.
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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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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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Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.
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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.
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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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There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
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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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Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
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In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.
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When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
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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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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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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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When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.
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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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Love means having something to betray.
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There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.
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Home's where you go when you run out of homes.
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