Quotes from Graham Greene

If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to pity even the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?

Childhood is the writer's bank balance.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness.

It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.

If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.

Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who — when he has been seriously noted at all — has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me?

You do not always say goodbye to those you love beside a deathbed, in an atmosphere of leisure and incense.

So one always starts a journey in a strange land -- taking too many precautions, until one tires of the exertion and abandons care in the worst spot of all.

Politics in Turkey are taken more seriously than they are at home. It was only quite recently that they executed a Prime Minister. We dream of it, but they act.

He had thought that home was something one possessed, but the things one had possessed were cursed with change; it was what one didn't possess that remained the same and welcomed him.

Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my drinks. What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?

Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.

We praise heroes as though they are rare, and yet we are always ready to blame another man for lack of heroism.

They had the comfort of not learning from experience.

He had heard men talk of the unfairness of a death-bed repentance - as if it was an easy thing to break the habit of a life whether to do good or evil.

tea. He watched her while she made it, made it, of course, all wrong: the water not on the boil, the teapot unheated, too few leaves. She said, I never quite understand why English people like teas so.

I wouldn't like to be cremated', she said. 'You'd prefer worms?' 'Yes, I would.

He put his mouth on her and kissed her on the cheek; he was afraid of the mouth-thoughts travel too easily from lip to lip.

In her view when a thing was done, it was done: remorse died with the act.

I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?

No wine can be regarded as unimportant, my friend, since the marriage at Cana.

It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.

The more unstable life is the less one likes the small details to alter.