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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

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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
Term
Entered
War
Pigs
Remember
Vietnam
America
Madness
Long
Historical
Worse
Mccarthyism
Periods
Disastrous
Worst
Potentially

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Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
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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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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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You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.
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When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
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Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time.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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Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
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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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For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
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I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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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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I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
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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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All power corrupts but some must govern.
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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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All men are born free: just not for long.
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There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
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