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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
Lives
Cowboy
Espionage
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

More quotes by John le Carre

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In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job.
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I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
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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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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.
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The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
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If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
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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.
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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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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.
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We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
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The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God.
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And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day. Because they have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.
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There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
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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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I mean, you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?
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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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I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
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When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
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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.
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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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