Quote

I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.

John le Carre

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Religions
Literature
Given
Great
Think
Thinking
Impertinent
Impunity
Blasphemy

More quotes by John le Carre

Image
What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
John le Carre
Image
Wives? she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, None active, as if wives were volcanoes.
John le Carre
Image
I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.
John le Carre
Image
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.
John le Carre
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
John le Carre
Image
Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
John le Carre
Image
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
John le Carre
Image
The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
John le Carre
Image
I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
John le Carre
Image
If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
John le Carre
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
John le Carre
Image
It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
John le Carre
Image
You should have died when I killed you.
John le Carre
Image
I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.
John le Carre