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

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Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
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The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.
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Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.
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When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.
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But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
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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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The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
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In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.
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Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.
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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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...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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I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
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The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
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Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
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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.
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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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It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
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The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
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