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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
Tragedy
Comedy
Wish
Used
Think
Thinking
Confuse
Distinguish
Clever

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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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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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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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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.
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He has the gift of quiet.
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The greatest threat to mankind comes from the renunciation of individual scruple in favor of institutional denominators. . . . Real heroism lies, as it always will, not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage. Which, come to think of it, is what we used to admire in our Christian savior
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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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It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
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History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
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All men are born free: just not for long.
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It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
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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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More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
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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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Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.
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There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
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A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.
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I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
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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.
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Love means having something to betray.
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