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Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.

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
Every
Cheat
Treasons
Liars
Canteen
Resist
Watery
Gentleman
Cheats
Loyalty
Cabbage
Criminals
Appalling
Moved
Gentlemen
May
Respectable

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In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
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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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Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
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The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
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When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly it's just the beginning.
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I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British.
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Home's where you go when you run out of homes.
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But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.
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Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
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I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.
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It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
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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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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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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
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Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.
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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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The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.
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You should have died when I killed you.
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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.
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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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