Quote

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

John le Carre

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Comedy
Wish
Used
Think
Thinking
Confuse
Distinguish
Clever
Tragedy

More quotes by John le Carre

Image
The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God.
John le Carre
Image
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
Image
As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
John le Carre
Image
It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
John le Carre
Image
Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
John le Carre
Image
The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
John le Carre
Image
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
Image
I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.
John le Carre
Image
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.
John le Carre
Image
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
Image
Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
John le Carre
Image
I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
John le Carre
Image
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.
John le Carre
Image
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.
John le Carre
Image
I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.
John le Carre
Image
Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.
John le Carre
Image
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
Image
In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
John le Carre
Image
Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.
John le Carre
Image
Agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation tunnelers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip readers and disguise artists.
John le Carre