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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?

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
Simply
Less
Government
Mean
Benevolent
Ruthless
Opposition
Policy

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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 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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Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.
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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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There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
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Those who are not with Mr. Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall -- just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.
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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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Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time.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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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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There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
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You should have died when I killed you.
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Agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation tunnelers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip readers and disguise artists.
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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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I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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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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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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In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.
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The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy.
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Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.
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