Top 100 Graham Greene Quotes
#1. With Graham Greene life is a precious, perpetual, snot-sodden whinge.
John Crowley
#2. 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
#3. I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.
Ross Macdonald
#4. I work every day until I do not have more to say. I learned from Graham Greene that a very good way is to stop work in the middle of a sentence. Then you know exactly how to continue the day after.
Henning Mankell
#5. Graham Greene, as I understand it, was quite outspoken in his criticism of American foreign policy.
Brendan Fraser
#6. Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.
Phil Klay
#7. Graham Greene famously said that all writers need a chip of ice in their heart; Cusk can come across as the most beautiful ice palace of stalactites and stalagmites, and some people find her company, albeit by proxy, about as inviting as a long weekend in a walk-in frigidaire.
Julie Burchill
#8. Graham Greene once said that life was lived in the first twenty years and the remainder was just reflection. So
Paul Kalanithi
#9. Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.
Alan Furst
#10. My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.
James D. Watson
#11. There was also the time that competitors were asked to submit a paragraph of a Graham Greene parody: Greene himself entered under a pseudonym and placed third.
Christopher Hitchens
#12. For a while we were chasing a book by Graham Greene to do Brighton Rock as a musical. We didn't get the rights, so we decided to create something from scratch, with Jonathan. By that time we were big fans of his work.
Neil Tennant
#13. I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.
Amy Waldman
#14. Hatred is a failure of imagination.'
Graham Greene, 'The Power and the Glory'.
Graham Greene
#15. I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.
Alan Furst
#16. From Graham Greene, I learnt how to be an accessible writer who grapples with our doubts as sentient individuals.
Douglas Kennedy
#17. 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
#18. My parents were interested in history and the world. My father read Graham Greene and Georges Simenon and was a strong trade unionist and Labour supporter.
Robert Harris
#19. Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.
Paul Theroux
#20. Graham Greene at 82 years old was still writing, and I don't think anyone can deny the force, the expertise, and the unique quality of his writing, if you take his complete oeuvre.
William Golding
#21. In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.
Eleanor Catton
#22. My three favorite travel writers of all time are Robert Louis Stevenson, Graham Greene, and Chuck Thompson. Smile When You're Lying not only tells the truth about the travel-writing racket, it gets to the heart of some of the travel industry's best-kept secrets.
Kinky Friedman
#23. I am a Graham Greene fan - I'm just a ferocious reader. I read an awful lot when I get the time.
Andrea Riseborough
#24. As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.
Julie Burchill
#25. I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.
Patricia Highsmith
#26. My life may be encapsulated by one of Graham Greene's "entertainments" titles: 'Loser Takes All'. Since I was thrown out of highschool for political reasons, I was free to study on my own and develop my own ways of thinking.
Israel Gelfand
#27. You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels.
William Golding
#28. The best smell is bread, the best taste is salt," Graham Greene wrote, adding, "and the best love is that of children.
Anonymous
#29. When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.
Alan Furst
#30. Was the secret of lasting youth known only to the criminal mind?
Graham Greene
#31. One can't love humanity. One can only love people.
Graham Greene
#32. 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
#33. Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.
Graham Greene
#34. She was proud of her power of prophecy, though she had not yet lived to see any of her prophecies fulfilled.
Graham Greene
#35. 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
#36. Knowledge was the great thing
not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge.
Graham Greene
#37. Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.
Graham Greene
#38. A man kept his character even when he was insane.
Graham Greene
#39. He disapproved, he didn't believe in girls drinking, he was full of the conventions of a generation older than himself. Of course one drank oneself, one fornicated, but one didn't lie with a friend's sister, and 'decent' girls were never squiffy.
Graham Greene
#40. Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.
Graham Greene
#41. 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
#43. Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love
it's being unhappy together.
Graham Greene
#45. Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men
Graham Greene
#46. I don't believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.
Graham Greene
#47. Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.
Graham Greene
#48. 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
#49. But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know
from experience
how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and ...
Graham Greene
#50. I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.
Graham Greene
#51. The only building finished in Duvalierville is the cock-fight stadium.
Graham Greene
#52. 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
#53. When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.
Graham Greene
#54. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape
anywhere
for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.
Graham Greene
#56. He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?
Graham Greene
#57. 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
#58. At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.
Graham Greene
#59. In the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.
Graham Greene
#60. There's no such thing as gratitude in politics.
Graham Greene
#61. All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.
Graham Greene
#62. And for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship - pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish we were to be afraid of loneliness.
Graham Greene
#64. In a common situation, I suppose we all behave much alike and use the same words.
Graham Greene
#65. It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover.
Graham Greene
#66. We are fools when we love. I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw her changing
I don't know if she really was, but I couldn't bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran toward the finish just like a coward runs toward the enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to get death over.
Graham Greene
#67. People who like quotations love meaningless generalisations.
Graham Greene
#68. I had committed myself: without love I'd have to go through the gestures of love.
Graham Greene
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
Graham Greene
#72. When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end.
Graham Greene
#73. 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
#74. There wasn't any point in being angry with anyone - the offender was too obviously myself ...
Graham Greene
#75. It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.
Graham Greene
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.
Graham Greene
#79. You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
Graham Greene
#80. She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom
shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.
Graham Greene
#81. A book is like a sandy path which keeps the indent of footprints.
Graham Greene
#82. Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?
Graham Greene
#84. 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
#85. He opened the book at random, or so he believed, but a book is like a sandy path which keeps the indent of footsteps.
Graham Greene
#86. Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.
Graham Greene
#87. There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.
Graham Greene
#88. I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.
Graham Greene
#89. But if I start believing that, then I have to believe in your God. I'd have to love your God. I'd rather love the men you slept with.
Graham Greene
#90. If one knew, he wondered, the facts,
would one have to pity even the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?
Graham Greene
#91. A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.
Graham Greene
#92. But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Graham Greene
#93. It's a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible.
Graham Greene
#94. He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.
Graham Greene
#95. Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness
Graham Greene
#96. Perhaps all life was like that
dull and then a heroic flurry at the end.
Graham Greene
#97. Sometimes I would walk with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure. If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night.
Graham Greene
#98. When there was a choice between love of a woman and hate of a man, her mind could cherish only one emotion, for her love might be a subject for laughter, but no one ever had ever mocked her hatred.
Graham Greene
#99. A romantic is usually afraid in case reality doesn't come up to expectations.
Graham Greene
#100. Love taught me that your honour did but jest.
Graham Greene
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