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When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
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
Keep
Problem
Engulf
Nothing
Threatens
Like
Detail
Irrelevant
Details
Head
Water
More quotes by John le Carre
For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.
John le Carre
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
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
Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.
John le Carre
It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
John le Carre
In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.
John le Carre
Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time.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
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
More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
John le Carre
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
I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
John le Carre
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
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
Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
John le Carre
I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
John le Carre
Every writer knows he is spurious every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
John le Carre
It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
John le Carre
I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
John le Carre
Home's where you go when you run out of homes.
John le Carre
