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I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.

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
Thinking
Confuse
Distinguish
Clever
Tragedy
Comedy
Wish
Used
Think

More quotes by John le Carre

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Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time.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.
John le Carre
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Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
John le Carre
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I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.
John le Carre
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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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Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
John le Carre
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Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
John le Carre
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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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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
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I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
John le Carre
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Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.
John le Carre
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In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire.
John le Carre
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There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
John le Carre
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In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre