I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention. John le Carré

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.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. 

Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

I suffer from the same frustration that every decent American suffers from. That is, that you begin to wonder whether decent liberal instincts, decent humanitarian instincts, can actually penetrate the right-wing voice, get through the steering of American opinion by the mass media.

America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.

John le Carré