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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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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
Decades
Continue
Confessed
Nation
Spy
Nations
Couch
Come
Couches
World
Subconscious
Collectives
Collective

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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
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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.
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All power corrupts but some must govern.
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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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I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
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All men are born free: just not for long.
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Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
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Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.
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I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British.
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History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
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The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
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I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
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I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
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It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
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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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He has the gift of quiet.
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More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
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...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.
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Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishounorable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.
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People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem.
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