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

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There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
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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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I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
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Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.
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The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
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Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.
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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.
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The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.
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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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Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
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When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly it's just the beginning.
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Wives? she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, None active, as if wives were volcanoes.
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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.
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Every writer knows he is spurious every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
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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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What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
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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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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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All men are born free: just not for long.
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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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