Graham Greene

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.

— Graham Greene

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

— Graham Greene

Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.

— Graham Greene

Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.

— Graham Greene

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

— Graham Greene

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

— Graham Greene

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.

— Graham Greene

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

— Graham Greene

I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?

— Graham Greene

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

— Graham Greene

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

— Graham Greene

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

— Graham Greene

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

— Graham Greene

The world doesn't make any heroes anymore.

— Graham Greene

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.

— Graham Greene

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.

— Graham Greene

They are always saying God loves us. If that's love I'd rather have a bit of kindness.

— Graham Greene

Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.

— Graham Greene

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

When we are not sure, we are alive.

— Graham Greene

Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.

— Graham Greene

Nothing in life was as ugly as death.

— Graham Greene

If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?

— Graham Greene

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

— Graham Greene

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

— Graham Greene

A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.

— Graham Greene

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.

— Graham Greene

Failure too is a form of death.

— Graham Greene

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.

— Graham Greene

Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.

— Graham Greene

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

— Graham Greene

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

— Graham Greene

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

— Graham Greene

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

— Graham Greene

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

— Graham Greene

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

— Graham Greene

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

— Graham Greene

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

— Graham Greene

Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.

— Graham Greene

I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.

— Graham Greene

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.

— Graham Greene

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

— Graham Greene

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

— Graham Greene

Ο θάνατος είναι πάντα από μόνος του μια απόδειξη ειλικρίνειας.

— Graham Greene

I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different

— Graham Greene

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

— Graham Greene

Have you seen a room from which faith has gone?...Like a marriage from which love has gone...And patience, patience everywhere like a fog.

— Graham Greene

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.

— Graham Greene

It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

— Graham Greene

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

— Graham Greene

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

— Graham Greene

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.

— Graham Greene

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

— Graham Greene

Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.

— Graham Greene

The world is not black and white. More like black and grey.

— Graham Greene

That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

— Graham Greene

Ο θάνατος είναι πάντα από μόνος του μια απόδειξη ειλικρίνειας.

— Graham Greene

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

— Graham Greene

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

— Graham Greene

You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?

— Graham Greene

The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief.

— Graham Greene

Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

[Ida] "...It's a good world if you don't weaken."

— Graham Greene

We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

— Graham Greene

… it was the little things which tripped you up.

— Graham Greene

[Priest at Hale's cremation] "...our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit."

— Graham Greene

[After Hale's cremation] She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens. Fred dropped indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept.

— Graham Greene

Man is made by the places in which he lives...

— Graham Greene

[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe'.

— Graham Greene

[About Pinkie's inability to empathise] The imagination hadn't awoken. That was his strength. He couldn't see through other people's eyes, or feel with their nerves. Only the music made him uneasy.

— Graham Greene

[Rose, taken out for the evening by Pinkie] She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present – she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.

— Graham Greene

You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.

— Graham Greene

...the Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned: life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I'll spoil your looks.

— Graham Greene

...he knew there wasn't a soul in the mob he could trust – except perhaps Dallow. That didn't matter. You couldn't make mistakes when you trusted nobody.

— Graham Greene

Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises ...

— Graham Greene

The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

— Graham Greene

He knew everything in theory, nothing in practice... He knew the moves, he'd never played the game.

— Graham Greene

People talk," Ida Arnold said. "People talk all the time.

— Graham Greene

[Cubitt hurling insults at Pinky after he refuses to lend him money] The picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ, the image of their own sentimentality. ...He was like a professor describing to a stranger some place he had only read in books:...when all the time it was a country the stranger knew...

— Graham Greene

Perhaps his laughter saved them — it must be difficult to shoot a laughing man: you have to feel important to kill.

— Graham Greene

Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps — violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on.

— Graham Greene

The old lady knelt, saying her 'Hail Mary'; She didn't believe — but among Catholics even the sceptical are courteous.

— Graham Greene

But the great moment was over — here in Orizaba it was like Galilee between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection — all the enthusiasm had been spent.

— Graham Greene

I suppose the love of life which periodically deserts most men was returning: like sexual desire, it moves in cycles.

— Graham Greene

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

— Graham Greene

When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity— that was a quality God's image carried with it.

— Graham Greene

How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

— Graham Greene

Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?

— Graham Greene

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man.... It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

— Graham Greene

People don't like reality, they don't like common sense, until age forces it on them.

— Graham Greene

The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.

— 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

No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life.

— Graham Greene

If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

— Graham Greene

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

— Graham Greene

To me comfort is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.

— Graham Greene

Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.

— 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

As long as one suffers one lives.

— Graham Greene

God save us always," I said, "from the innocent and the good.

— Graham Greene

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

— Graham Greene

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

— Graham Greene

The hurt is in the act of possession; we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

— Graham Greene

He’ll always be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

What right had I to value her less than the bodies in the square? Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel. I had judged like a journalist, in terms of quantity, and I had betrayed my own principles; I had become as engage as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decision would ever be simple again.

— Graham Greene

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

— Graham Greene

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

— Graham Greene

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

— Graham Greene

Those who marry God can become domesticated too—it’s just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word “Love” means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and “Ave Maria” like “dearest” is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world’s marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves—it was God’s taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.

— Graham Greene

One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn't wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is he with?

— Graham Greene

Cynicism is cheap—you can buy it at any Monoprix store—it’s built into all poor-quality goods.

— Graham Greene

However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.

— Graham Greene

I have often noticed that a bribe...has that effect — it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.

— 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

There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.

— Graham Greene

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

— Graham Greene

I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It’s the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and almost forgotten.

— Graham Greene

Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted.

— Graham Greene

Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

— Graham Greene

Failure too is a form of death.

— Graham Greene

It was not the kind of surroundings in which any one with free will — if such a man existed — would have chosen to await death.

— Graham Greene

He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.

— Graham Greene

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.

— Graham Greene

There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost

— Graham Greene

Under my cloak, a fig for the King!

— Graham Greene

Can you hate something you don't believe in? And yet he called himself a free-thinker. What an impossible paradox, to be free and to be so obsessed.

— Graham Greene

At the end of what is called the "sexual life" the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

— Graham Greene

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

— Graham Greene

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

— Graham Greene