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All power corrupts but some must govern.

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
Corrupts
Govern
Power
Must

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The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
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Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
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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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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.
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There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
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It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
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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 there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
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I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
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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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Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
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There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
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I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.
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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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The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
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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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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.
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If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
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Home's where you go when you run out of homes.
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