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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

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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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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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Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
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Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
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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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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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People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.
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All power corrupts but some must govern.
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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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There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
John le Carre
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We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
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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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There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.
John le Carre
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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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A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.
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I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.
John le Carre
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You should have died when I killed you.
John le Carre
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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.
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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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Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
John le Carre