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In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job.
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
Operation
Operations
Line
Lines
Jobs
Book
Every
More quotes by John le Carre
When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.
John le Carre
As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
John le Carre
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
John le Carre
The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.
John le Carre
I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
John le Carre
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
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 are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
John le Carre
If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
John le Carre
In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
John le Carre
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.
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
I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
John le Carre
But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.
John le Carre
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.
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
People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.
John le Carre
You should have died when I killed you.
John le Carre
I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.
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
