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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
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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
Need
Destroy
Needs
Solutions
Much
Bigger
Every
Hell
Penetrate
Like
Hand
Cell
Political
Cells
Hands
Solution
Find
Terror
More quotes by John le Carre
If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
John le Carre
Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
John le Carre
But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.
John le Carre
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
People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem.
John le Carre
Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch.
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
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.
John le Carre
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
John le Carre
In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
John le Carre
It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
John le Carre
There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
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
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