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It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
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
People
Pardonable
Counterparts
Assume
Vanity
Assuming
Everywhere
Lonely
Also
More quotes by John le Carre
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
John le Carre
Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
John le Carre
It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.
John le Carre
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
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
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
Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
John le Carre
If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
John le Carre
I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.
John le Carre
Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
John le Carre
I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
John le Carre
There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
John le Carre
In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire.
John le Carre
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
John le Carre
Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.
John le Carre
