John Le Carré

David John Moore Cornwell, better known by the pen name John le Carré, is a hugely respected author of espionage novels including: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Sailor Soldier Spy, Smiley's People, The Little Drummer Girl, The Russia House, The Night Manager, The Constant Gardener, Our Kind of Traitor, A Delicate Truth, A Legacy of Spies and Agent Running in the Field.

By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.

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.

He left Oxford in 1954 to teach at Millfield Preparatory School; however, a year later he returned to Oxford, and graduated in 1956 with a first class degree in modern languages. He then taught French and German at Eton College for two years, becoming an MI5 officer in 1958. He ran agents, conducted interrogations, tapped telephone lines and effected break-ins.

It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day.

In 1960, Cornwell transferred to MI6, the foreign-intelligence service, and worked under the cover of Second Secretary at the British Embassy at Bonn.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.

In 1964, le Carré left the service to work full-time as a novelist, his intelligence-officer career at an end as the result of the betrayal of British agents' covers to the KGB by Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent (one of the Cambridge Five).

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

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.

In 2008, The Times ranked him 22nd on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

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.

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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