Graham Greene Quotes

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, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.

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.

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

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

He knew everything in theory, nothing in practice... He knew the moves, he'd never played the game.

Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?

If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

[Ida] "...It's a good world if you don't weaken."

Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.

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

Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps — violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belong to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

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

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.

Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism … is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politique....Catholics and communists have commited 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...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?