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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
Head
Water
Keep
Problem
Engulf
Nothing
Threatens
Like
Detail
Irrelevant
Details
More quotes by John le Carre
When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.
John le Carre
I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no-one else can make them.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy.
John le Carre
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
What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
John le Carre
Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
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
You should have died when I killed you.
John le Carre
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
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.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
John le Carre
Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
John le Carre
A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.
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
It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
John le Carre
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.
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
All men are born free: just not for long.
John le Carre
