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For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.

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
Description
Worse
Conflict
Involved
Political
Better

More quotes by 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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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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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
John le Carre
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Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.
John le Carre
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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
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Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.
John le Carre
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America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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
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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.
John le Carre
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It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
John le Carre
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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
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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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As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
John le Carre
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The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
John le Carre
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Love means having something to betray.
John le Carre
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All men are born free: just not for long.
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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I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.
John le Carre