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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
Mean
Benevolent
Ruthless
Opposition
Policy
Simply
Less
Government
More quotes by John le Carre
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
John le Carre
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.
John le Carre
Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
John le Carre
Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
John le Carre
Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
John le Carre
Every writer knows he is spurious every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
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
On one hand we go like hell for every terror cell we can find, we penetrate it, we destroy it. On the other hand, there is a much bigger need for a political solution.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.
John le Carre
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.
John le Carre
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
John le Carre
