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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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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
Balance
Think
Writer
Dictum
Thinking
Another
Graham
Remember
Alienated
Back
Bank
Writers
Feel
Green
Feels
Childhood
Way

More quotes by John le Carre

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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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Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.
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Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
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When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.
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I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
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History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
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A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.
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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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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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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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For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
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It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
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Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
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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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If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
John le Carre
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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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When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.
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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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Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
John le Carre