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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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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
Speculation
Consists
Luck
Intelligence
Forget
Easy
Windfall
Scoop
Espionage
More quotes by John le Carre
I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.
John le Carre
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
For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
John le Carre
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
John le Carre
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
It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
John le Carre
I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
John le Carre
When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
John le Carre
I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.
John le Carre
Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
John le Carre
It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
John le Carre
All power corrupts but some must govern.
John le Carre
I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
John le Carre
I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
John le Carre
The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
John le Carre
I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
John le Carre
He has the gift of quiet.
John le Carre
I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
John le Carre
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
Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
John le Carre
