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Quotes by Graham Greene

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
– 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
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
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
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
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
Cynicism is cheap - you can buy it at any Monoprix store - it's built into all poor-quality goods.
– Graham Greene
Failure too is a form of death.
– Graham Greene
God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.
– Graham Greene
He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.
– Graham Greene
He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.
– Graham Greene
Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.
– Graham Greene
His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse.
– 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
If one is going to write about war, self respect demands that one.
– 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
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
It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
– 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
Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.
– 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
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
Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.
– 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
Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.
– 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
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
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
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
– Graham Greene
They are always saying God loves us. If that's love I'd rather have a bit of kindness.
– 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
We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
– Graham Greene
We mustn't complain too much of being comedians - it's an honorable 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
When we are not sure, we are alive.
– 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
You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?
– Graham Greene
Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.
– Graham Greene
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.
– Graham Greene
Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
– Graham Greene