Graham Greene Quotes

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

He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety.

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

I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It's the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

Never presume yours is a better morality.

Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.

Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart is an untrustworthy beast.The mind too,but it doesn't talk about love.

I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you.

love had turned into "love affair" with a begining and an end.

Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.

Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief.

They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?

Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.

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

And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.

Love taught me that your honour did but jest.

So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.

I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.

For a good man fame is always a problem.

Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?

The world doesn't make any heroes anymore.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.

Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there.

Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.

Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.

Death was far more certain than God.

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

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

Failure too is a form of death.

One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

Destruction after all is a form of creation.

You cannot control what you love--you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.

It's a good world if you don't weaken.

All good novelists have bad memories.

I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.

We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.

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.