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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.

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
Strive
Ideologies
Angel
Prisoners
Events
Condemned
Impossible
Selves
Self
Striving
Heart
Prisoner
Like
Angels
Trailed
Ideology
Whores

More quotes by John le Carre

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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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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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The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
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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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Every writer knows he is spurious every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
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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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Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.
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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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Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
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Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
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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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As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
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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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Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.
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In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
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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.
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For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.
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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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If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
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The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
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