Greene Graham Quotes & Sayings

Pyle could see pain when it was in front of his eyes. (I don't write that as a sneer; there are so many of us who can't) — Graham Greene

I felt for the first time the premonitory of loneliness.It was all fantastic, and yet, and yet ... He might be a poor lover, but I was a poor man. He had in his hand the infinite riches of respectability — 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

Writing about Africa by Africans has been part of my literary apprenticeship, standing alongside works by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene as influences. — Giles Foden

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God. — Graham Greene

Always tell us where we are. And don't just tell us where something is, make it pay off. Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character. Look at the openings of Fitzgerald stories, and Graham Greene, they're great at this. — Janet Fitch

It's always the same wherever one goes- it's not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations — Graham Greene

The dead of an army become automatically heroes like the dead of the Church become Martyrs. — Graham Greene

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity. — Graham Greene

Somebody always leaves a banana-skin on the scene of tragedy. — Graham Greene

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

There are times, aren't there, when Shakespeare is a little dull. — Graham Greene

Like Johns, I am one of the little men, not interested in ideologies, tied to a flat Cambridgeshire landscape, a chalk quarry, a line of willows across the featureless fields, a market town
his thoughts scrabbled at the curtain
where he used to dance at the Saturday hops. — Graham Greene

You talk too easily,' the Boy said.
'Talk?' Mr Prewitt said. 'I could shake the world. Let them put me in the dock if they like. I'll give them - revelation. I've sunk so deep I carry - ' he was shaken by an enormous windy self-esteem - he hiccupped twice - 'the secrets of the sewer. — 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

You try to draw everything into the net of your faith, father, but you can't steal all the virtues. Gentleness isn't Christian, self-sacrifice isn't Christian, charity isn't, remorse isn't. I expect the cavemen wept to see another's tears. — Graham Greene

When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself. — Graham Greene

The problem of pretending to be alive. — Graham Greene

I became aware that our love was doomed; love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn't settle to work. I would reconstruct what we had said to each other; I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted I was happy; I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death; I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck. — Graham Greene

After reading Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad when I was a student at Yale, I wanted to live in the world they captured in their books. I had had some experience living in Africa. I was drawn to that kind of adventure. — Leslie Cockburn

There wasn't any point in being angry with anyone - the offender was too obviously myself ... — Graham Greene

Never presume yours is a better morality. — Graham Greene

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey. — Graham Greene

On the plane, I like to read fiction set in the location I'm going to. Fiction is in many ways more useful than a guidebook, because it gives you those little details, a sense of the way a place smells, an emotional sense of the place. So, I'll bring Graham Greene's The Quiet American if I'm going to Vietnam. It's good to feel romantic about a destination before you arrive. — Anthony Bourdain

How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a god made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any god wo is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as the air. — Graham Greene

He had been frightened and so he had been vehement. — Graham Greene

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

To all pimps and whores a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea. — Graham Greene

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

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings. — Graham Greene

Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men — Graham Greene

We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts. — Graham Greene

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. All my life I've tried to live that illusion. — 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

You put the small thief in prison, but the big thief lives in a palace. — Graham Greene

Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement. — Graham Greene

What distant ancestors had given me this stupid conscience? Surely they were free of it when they raped and killed m their palaeolithic world. — Graham Greene

If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A. , I would certainly choose the Soviet Union. — Graham Greene

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. — Graham Greene

I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings. — Graham Greene

He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted - to be a saint. — Graham Greene

What makes a man, without hope, cling to a few more minutes of existence? — Graham Greene

Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative. — Phil Klay

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

So one always starts a journey in a strange land
taking too many precautions, until one tires of the exertion and abandons care in the worst spot of all. — Graham Greene

Marlowe's devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan - it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth. — Graham Greene

St. Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn't exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist. — Graham Greene

The only building finished in Duvalierville is the cock-fight stadium. — Graham Greene

I am late,' she said, 'I know that I am late. So many little things have to be done when you are alone, and I am not yet accustomed to being alone,' she added with a pretty little sob which reminded me of a cut-glass Victorian tear-bottle. She took off thick winter gloves with a wringing gesture which made me think of handkerchiefs wet with grief, and her hands looked suddenly small and useless and vulnerable. — Graham Greene

If ash-trays could speak, sir.' 'Indeed, yes. — Graham Greene

In the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship. — Graham Greene

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

We forget very easily what gives us pain. — Graham Greene

Fear is easily experienced, but fun is hard to come by in old age, so I already felt a sense of gratitude to General Omar Torrijos. — Graham Greene

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us. — Graham Greene

It is you who are old fashioned with your machine-guns and your gas and your talk of country. — Graham Greene

It's not really much good tearing out a page because you can see the place where it's been torn. [ ... ] You can pull a stamp out,' she said with terrible youthful clarity, 'and you don't know that it's ever been there. — Graham Greene

A book is like a sandy path which keeps the indent of footprints. — Graham Greene

She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there. — Graham Greene

You are lovely, brilliant, witty ... the incredible words which would relieve her of any need to repay him or refuse his gifts; loveliness and wit were priced higher than any gift he offered, while if a girl were loved, even old women of hard experience would admit her right to take and never give. — 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. — Graham Greene

Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around. — Graham Greene

What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment? — Graham Greene

The world doesn't make any heroes anymore. — Graham Greene

I'm not at peace anymore. I just want him like I used to in the old days. I want to be eating sandwiches with him. I want to be drinking with him in a bar. I'm tired and I don't want anymore pain. I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don't want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time. — Graham Greene

There was not much one could do; he decided at least to be good. — Graham Greene

They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about ... — Graham Greene

Oh, I'm not a Berkeleian. I believe my back's against this wall. I believe there's a sten gun over there. — Graham Greene

Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long. — 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

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

I hate your reasons. I don't want reasons. If you see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say - pain is a good thing, perhaps he'll be better for it one day. I want to let my heart speak ... Yes. At the end of a gun. — Graham Greene

I wondered whether she would consent to sleep with me that night if Pyle never came, but I knew that when I had smoked four pipes I would no longer want her. — Graham Greene

Suddenly I realized she was asleep. Exhausted by her flight she had fallen asleep against my shoulder as so many times, in taxis, in buses, on a park-seat. I sat still and let her be. There was nothing to disturb her in the dark church. The candles napped around the virgin, and there was nobody else there. The slowly growing pain in my upper arm where her weight lay was the greatest pleasure I had ever known. — Graham Greene

She thought for the first time, with happiness: perhaps I have a life in people's minds when I am not there to be seen or talked to. — Graham Greene

Cynicism is cheap - you can buy it at any monoprix store. it's built into all poor-quality goods. — Graham Greene

I have never met a simple man. Not even in the confessional, though I used to sit there for hours on end. Man was not created simple. When I was a young priest, I used to try to unravel what motives a man or woman had, what temptations and self-delusions. But I soon learned to give all that up, because there was never a straight answer. No one was simple enough for me to understand. In the end I would just say, 'Three Our Fathers, Three Hail Marys. Go in peace. — Graham Greene

Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy? — Graham Greene

People don't demand that a thing be reasonable if their emotions are touched. Lovers aren't reasonable, are they? — Graham Greene

Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac. — Graham Greene

You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced. — Graham Greene

We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. It's as if we were working together on the same statue, cutting it out of each other's misery. But I don't even know the design. — Graham Greene

That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent. — Graham Greene

Cruel men cry easily at the cinema. — Graham Greene

Can't one love or hate", I broke out at him, "as long as that? Don't make any mistake. I'm just another of your jealous clients, I don't claim to be any different fro m the rest,but there's been a time-lag in my case. — Graham Greene

You don't bless what you love ... It's when you want to love and you can't manage it. You stretch out your hands and you say God forgive me that I can't love but bless this thing anyway ... We have to bless what we hate ... It would be better to love, but that's not always possible. — Graham Greene

You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?. — Graham Greene

Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness? — Graham Greene

I have no need to write to you or talk to you, you know everything before I can speak, but when one loves, one feels the need to use the same old ways one has always used. I know I am only beginning to love, but already I want to abandon everything, everybody but you: only fear and habit prevent me. — Graham Greene

A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system. — Graham Greene

Why do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't time to disguise itself? Nobody here could talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up — Graham Greene

Who could blame her for seeking my scars in return? When we are unhappy we hurt. — Graham Greene

Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved us all a lot of trouble . . . — Graham Greene

The Mayor about the fable of the Prodigal Son:
'But he came home.'
'Yes, his courage failed him. He felt very alone on that pig farm. There was no branch of the Party to which he could look for help. Das Kapital had not yet been written, so he was unable to situate himself in the class struggle. Is it any wonder that he wavered for a time, poor boy? — 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 clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature. — Graham Greene

The main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author, they come out of his body as a child comes from the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut, and they grow into independence. The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in. — 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

As long as one suffers one lives. — Graham Greene

It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much. — Graham Greene