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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.

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
Sanity
Superior
Superiors
Experts
Destroyed
Ignorance
World
Bureaucrats
Madmen

More quotes by John le Carre

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There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
John le Carre
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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.
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.
John le Carre
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We've had enough. He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. We've had a bellyful, in fact. And like everyone who's had enough, said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, he wants more.
John le Carre
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For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.
John le Carre
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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
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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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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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In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
John le Carre
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But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
John le Carre
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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.
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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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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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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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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I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
John le Carre
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There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
John le Carre
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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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Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
John le Carre
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I think that all writers feel alienated. ... I know that I do. ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated.
John le Carre