Graham Greene Quotes

219 Sourced Quotes

And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.

Graham Greene
If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.

Graham Greene
I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school—a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.

Graham Greene
It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.

Graham Greene
Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

Graham Greene
The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belong to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

Graham Greene
Thrillers are like life—more like life than you are … it's what we've all made of the world.

Graham Greene
The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.

Graham Greene
I'm only saying I want you to be happy. I hate your being unhappy. I don't mind anything you do that makes you happy." You just want an excuse. If I sleep with anybody else, you feel you can do the same - any time." That's neither here nor there. I want you to be happy, that's all." You'd make my bed for me?" Perhaps.

Graham Greene
We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us — Martins felt the little jab of dispensability.

Graham Greene
[Re Hale] He only felt his loneliness after his third gin.

Graham Greene
The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graham Greene