"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 Carré’s reflection draws on Graham Greene’s idea that a writer’s formative years function like an emotional bank account, providing rich reserves to be drawn on throughout their creative life. Childhood, with its heightened intensity, sensitivities, and sometimes pain, becomes a storehouse of experiences, impressions, and unresolved emotional puzzles. For le Carré, as for Greene, these early years furnish the raw material for later fiction, both consciously and through the buried influence of memory.

Central to this perspective is the theme of alienation. Many writers, le Carré contends, feel a fundamental separation from their surroundings, a difference that turns them into observers, outsiders looking in. This sense of alienation doesn’t just accompany adulthood but is often rooted in childhood itself, when distinctions between self and others, or between inner and outer worlds, are first sharply perceived. The child who feels misplaced, misunderstood, or apart is the one who learns to watch, analyze, and eventually tell stories. The distance forced by alienation breeds empathy as well as suspicion; it gives writers what le Carré elsewhere described as “the fifth column in one’s soul,” a capacity for critical self-examination and for assuming multiple perspectives.

Le Carré, whose own childhood was marked by instability and betrayal, hints that writing becomes a return, conscious or unconscious, to trench warfare with those early feelings of exclusion. The act of storytelling, then, doubles as both therapy and exploration. Each story, each character, becomes a means of approaching the childhood store: to spend, reinterpret, or transform those old emotional assets, whether they’re treasures or traumas. Thus, the writer’s life is a dialogue with their own past self, shaped in alienation and cultivating it as a gift that’s as much a curse as a calling, fueling the mission to analyze, commemorate, and imaginatively overcome their own childhood solitude.