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What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.

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
Play
Rotten
Martyrs
Sadists
Think
Saints
Drunkards
Squalid
Thinking
Fools
Procession
Pansies
People
Priests
Spy
Brighten
Vain
Traitor
Traitors
Saint
Martyr
Spies
Fool
Indians
Cowboys
Lives
Cowboy
Espionage

More quotes by John le Carre

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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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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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All power corrupts but some must govern.
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The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
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I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.
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It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
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Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
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Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.
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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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Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
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It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three.
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In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.
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A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.
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When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
John le Carre
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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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I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.
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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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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.
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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
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Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.
John le Carre