Graham Greene Quotes

[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe'.

… it was the little things which tripped you up.

Thrillers are like life—more like life than you are … it’s what we’ve all made of the world.

However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.

No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life.

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.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

Have you seen a room from which faith has gone?...Like a marriage from which love has gone...And patience, patience everywhere like a fog.

I suppose the love of life which periodically deserts most men was returning: like sexual desire, it moves in cycles.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.

Man is made by the places in which he lives...

...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.

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?