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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
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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
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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
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At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.
Graham Greene
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety.
Graham Greene
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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
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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
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Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.
Graham Greene
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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
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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
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The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?
Graham Greene
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Who knows whether there may not be a moment in childhood when the world changes forever, like making a face when the clock strikes?
Graham Greene
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Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.
Graham Greene
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Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.
Graham Greene
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Graham Greene
Born:
October 2, 1904
Died:
April 3, 1991
(aged 86)
Bio:
Henry Graham Greene was an English novelist and author regarded by some as one of the great writers of the 20th century.
Known for:
The Quiet American (1955)
The Power and the Glory (1940)
The End of the Affair (1951)
The Heart of the Matter (1948)
Brighton Rock (1938)
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