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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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In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
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Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
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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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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.
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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.
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For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
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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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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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Love means having something to betray.
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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 think that all writers feel alienated. ... I know that I do. ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
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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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There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
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It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
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Home's where you go when you run out of homes.
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