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There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.

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
Difference
Cold
Changed
Differences
Islam
Fighting
Radical
Bigs
Rules
War
Havens
Haven

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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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But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.
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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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Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.
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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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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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I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
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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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It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
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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.
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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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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 power corrupts but some must govern.
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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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I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
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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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There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
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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.
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When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.
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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