Graham Greene Quotes

Cynicism is cheap—you can buy it at any Monoprix store—it’s built into all poor-quality goods.

...the Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned: life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I'll spoil your looks.

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

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

[After Hale's cremation] She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens. Fred dropped indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept.

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

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

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.

Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted.

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.

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 ...

And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but not there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel – the end of love. That was being worked out not, like a story: the pointed word that sent her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.

Sooner or later...one has to take sides – if one is to remain human.

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.