Graham Greene Quotes

The hurt is in the act of possession; we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

"People talk," Ida Arnold said. "People talk all the time."

It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and almost forgotten.

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 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.

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

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

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

Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.

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.

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

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.

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

Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.

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.