Wealth & Money Quote by John Le Carre

Le Carre smuggles a bleak origin story into a tidy financial metaphor, and the metaphor does double duty: it flatters the romance of “the writer” while quietly indicting the costs. By invoking Graham Greene’s “bank balance,” he treats childhood not as a sentimental past but as stored capital - accumulated, tallied, and later withdrawn in prose. It’s a shrewd bit of trade talk from a novelist who made betrayal, doubled identities, and institutional coldness feel like the weather.

The follow-up - “I think that all writers feel alienated” - isn’t a grand theory so much as a professional confession dressed up as a general rule. Le Carre frames alienation as both wound and credential: if you’re inside the room, you can’t see it clearly; if you’re outside, you can observe, translate, and expose. That outsider stance is the engine of his fiction, where characters survive by reading micro-signals and distrusting official narratives. Alienation becomes a kind of training.

The key move is the retreat to “most of us” and then the admission: “I know that I do.” He starts with inherited wisdom, broadens it into a near-universal condition, then collapses it back into autobiography. Subtext: don’t ask me for romance about craft; ask what it cost. Context matters: Le Carre’s own childhood was marked by instability and his father’s fraudulence, and his adult life in intelligence work sharpened the sense that belonging is often just a cover story. Here, alienation isn’t a mood; it’s the account where the material is kept.