Graham Greene Quotes

» 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.

» 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.

» 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.

» 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.

» Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

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

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

» 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.

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

» When we are not sure, we are alive.

» 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.

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

» 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.

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

» Failure too is a form of death.

» 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?

» 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.

» 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.

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

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

» 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.

» 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.

» Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

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

» 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.

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

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

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

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

» 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.

» A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.

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

» 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.

» The world doesn't make any heroes anymore.

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

» Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are; it's what we've all made of the world.

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

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

» 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.

» 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.

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