Graham Greene Quotes

219 Sourced Quotes

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

Graham Greene
American bankers believe in the personal touch; the teller conveys a sense that he happens to be there accidentally and he is overjoyed at the lucky chance of the encounter.

Graham Greene
I aim to be content with what I produce. It's an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.

Graham Greene
Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.

Graham Greene
Like the characters in Chekhov, they have no reserves -– you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances.

Graham Greene
I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

Graham Greene
The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety.

Graham Greene
Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.

Graham Greene
With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed-he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.

Graham Greene
Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise; on the other hand I am not deliberately melodramatic; don't get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am.

Graham Greene
My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action -- even an opinion is a kind of action.

Graham Greene
I write about situations that are common, universal might be more correct, in which my characters are involved and from which only faith can redeem them, though often the actual manner of the redemption is not immediately clear. They sin, but there is no limit to God's mercy and because this is important, there is a difference between not confessing in fact, and the complacent and the pious may not realize it.

Graham Greene
At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.

Graham Greene
Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.

Graham Greene
For God's sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn't just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.

Graham Greene
An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

Graham Greene
We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

Graham Greene
Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.

Graham Greene
I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.

Graham Greene
One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.

Graham Greene
No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.

Graham Greene
It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.

Graham Greene
It's a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible.

Graham Greene
A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.

Graham Greene
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

Graham Greene
People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.

Graham Greene
God... created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed — that is the meaning of evolution.

Graham Greene
Sooner or later... one has to take sides – if one is to remain human.

Graham Greene
He felt the loyalty we all feel to unhappiness—the sense that that is where we really belong.

Graham Greene
We mustn't complain too much of being comedians—it's an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed—that's all. We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men.

Graham Greene