Quotes from Graham Greene

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?

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 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.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.

For a good man fame is always a problem.

Cruel men cry easily at the cinema.

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.

Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.' Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.

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

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

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

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.

Sweet are the thoughts that savor of content: the quiet mind is richer than a crown.

Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?

Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness.

With Your great schemes, You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.

I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.

They haven't left us much to believe, have they? — even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.

How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.

Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.

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 name?