Graham Greene Quotes

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

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

I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.

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

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

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.

He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.

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.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

It is the storytellers task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.

Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.

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

A man kept his character even when he was insane.

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

There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

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.

Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.

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

There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

It's a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

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

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

A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced

Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.

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

It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.

The problem of pretending to be alive.

You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other.

Most things disappoint till you look deeper.

In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

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.

You cannot love without intuition.

I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.

Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness.

Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.

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

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

Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.

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

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

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

As long as one suffers one lives.

It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.