Graham Greene Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

Can you hate something you don't believe in? And yet he called himself a free-thinker. What an impossible paradox, to be free and to be so obsessed.

When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity— that was a quality God's image carried with it.

...he knew there wasn't a soul in the mob he could trust – except perhaps Dallow. That didn't matter. You couldn't make mistakes when you trusted nobody.

People don't like reality, they don't like common sense, until age forces it on them.

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.

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

The old lady knelt, saying her 'Hail Mary'; She didn't believe — but among Catholics even the sceptical are courteous.

… it was the little things which tripped you up.

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.

Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises ...

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