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Len Deighton Quotes

Leonard Cyril Deighton is a British author. His publications have included cookery books, history and military history, but he is best known for his spy novels.

After completing his national service in the Royal Air Force, Deighton attended art school in London, and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1955. He had several jobs before becoming a book and magazine illustrator—including designing the cover for first UK edition of Jack Kerouac's 1957 work On the Road. He also worked for a period in an advertising agency. During an extended holiday in France he wrote his first novel, The IPCRESS File, which was published in 1962, and was a critical and commercial success, and he wrote several spy novels featuring the same central character, a working class intelligence officer, cynical and tough.

Between 1962 and 1966 Deighton was the food correspondent for The Observer and drew cookstrips—black and white graphic recipes with a limited number of words. A selection were collected and published in 1965 as Len Deighton's Action Cook Book, the first of five cookery books he wrote. Other topics of non-fiction include history, particularly military history.

Several of Deighton's works have been adapted for film and other media. Films include The Ipcress File , Funeral in Berlin , Billion Dollar Brain and Spy Story . In 1988 Granada Television produced the miniseries Game, Set and Match based on his trilogy of the same name, and in 1995 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a "real time" dramatisation of his novel Bomber.



Wikipedia  

✵ 18. February 1929

Works

Funeral in Berlin
Funeral in Berlin
Len Deighton
An Expensive Place to Die
Charity
Charity
Len Deighton
London Match
London Match
Len Deighton
Len Deighton: 7   quotes 2   likes

Famous Len Deighton Quotes

“The tragedy of marriage is that while all women marry thinking that their man will change, all men marry believing their wife will never change.”

Len Deighton book London Match

London Match (London: Hutchinson, 1985) p. 18

“Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Yes? Well socialism is exactly the reverse.”

Len Deighton book Funeral in Berlin

Funeral in Berlin (1964; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) p. 145
Another Czech joke

“The factory workers say that it’s impossible to do anything right. If you arrive five minutes early you are a saboteur; if you arrive five minutes late you are betraying socialism; if you arrive on time they say, "Where did you get the watch?"”

Len Deighton book Funeral in Berlin

Funeral in Berlin (1964; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) pp. 144-5
Described there as a joke current in 1960s Czechoslovakia

“…But love is like the measles; the later in life it affects you, the more severe the consequences"
"Is there anything you can take for it?”

Len Deighton book Charity

"Only wedding vows"
Charity (1997; Harper Paperback, p. 280)

“Progress is man’s indifference to the lessons of history.”

Len Deighton book An Expensive Place to Die

An Expensive Place to Die, Jonathan Cape (1967) Ch. 39

“When old men decided to barter young men for pride and profit, the transaction was called war.”

Len Deighton

Eleven Declarations of War (London: Harcourt Brace, 1975) p. 11

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