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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

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
Library
Second
Hand
Reading
Hands
Book
Really
Men
Librarian

More quotes by John le Carre

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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?
John le Carre
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Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.
John le Carre
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Those who are not with Mr. Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall -- just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.
John le Carre
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He has the gift of quiet.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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
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What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
John le Carre
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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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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.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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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Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishounorable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.
John le Carre
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The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.
John le Carre
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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.
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.
John le Carre
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It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
John le Carre
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I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
John le Carre