I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.
I was raised on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Something about this genre - hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold - never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator.
Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.
I don't inflict horrors on readers. In my research, I've uncovered truly terrible documentations of cruelty and torture, but I leave that offstage. I always pull back and let the reader imagine the details. We all know to one degree or another the horrors of war.
What you get in the Cold War is 'the wilderness of mirrors' where you have to figure out what's good and what's evil. That's good for John le Carre, but not me.
I am there to entertain. I call my work high escape fiction; it's high, it's good - but it's escape, and I have no delusions about that. I have no ambition to be a serious writer, whatever that means.
Good people don't spend their time being good. Good people want to spend their time mowing the lawn and playing with the dog. But bad people spend all their time being bad. It is all they think about.
Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.
Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
I would have loved to have another 10 Eric Ambler books.
Fast-paced from start to finish, 'The Honourable Schoolboy' is fired by le Carre's conviction regarding evil done and its consequences.
Le Carre's voice - patrician, cold, brilliant and amused - was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction.
For John le Carre, it was always who's betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the '30s, it's a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.
My father died when I was young, and my mother, Ruth, went to work in an office selling theater and movie parties. She put me through private school, Horace Mann, in Riverdale. She sent me to camp so that I would learn to compete. She was a lioness, and I was her cub.
I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.
Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.
I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
In the 1930s, there were so many different conflicts going on between the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Romanians and so on.
I'm not really a mass market writer.
