Quotes from Graham Greene

Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.

It's always the same wherever one goes- it's not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations

Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved us all a lot of trouble . . .

In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness. So Dickens's wife and mistress had to suffer so that dickens could make his novels and his fortune. At least a bank manager's money is not so tainted by egotism. Mine was not a destructive profession. A bank manager doesn't leave a trail of the martyred behind him.

Everyday life seems so permanent and unshakable?but, as I was reminded by these writers, it can be destroyed by a single phone call.

If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have a dream of her at night.

I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate,...

I know myself, and I know the depth of my selfishness. I cannot be at ease (and to be at ease is my chief wish) if someone else is in pain, visibly or audibly or tactually. Sometimes this is mistaken by the innocent for unselfishness, when all I am doing is sacrificing a small good - in this case postponement in attending to my hurt - for the sake of a far greater good) a peace of mind when I need think only of myself.

One is apt to be unfair to somebody one has loved a great deal.

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.

Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women's kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting.

I'm afraid of the dark.' And his mother: 'Don't be silly. You know there's nothing to be afraid in the dark.' But he knew hte falsity of the reasoning; he knew how they taught also that there was nothing to fear in death, and how fearfully they avoided the idea of it.

I ought to write funny books. Life is really too horribly funny, but unless one`s an outsider looking on, it`s all such a bore.

Like Johns, I am one of the little men, not interested in ideologies, tied to a flat Cambridgeshire landscape, a chalk quarry, a line of willows across the featureless fields, a market town--his thoughts scrabbled at the curtain--where he used to dance at the Saturday hops.

There's only things, Blackie.

experience had taught him how far their minds reflected each other. But he was the elder, by a matter of minutes, and that brief extra interval of light, while his brother still struggled in pain and darkness, had given him self-reliance and an instinct of protection towards the other who was afraid of so many things.

His lips felt dry with a literal thirst for righteousness, which was like a glass of ice-cold water on a table in another man's room.

The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety. (The Power and the Glory)

Is confidence based on a rate of exchange? We used to speak of sterling qualities. Have we got to talk now about a dollar love? A dollar love, of course, would include marriage and Junior and Mother's Day, even though later it might include Reno or the Virgin Islands or wherever they go nowadays for their divorces. A dollar love had good intentions, a clear conscience, and to Hell with everybody.

The first dog I ever had was called Prince. I called him after the Black Prince. You know, the fellow who...' 'Massacred all the women and children in Limoges.' 'I don't remember that.' 'The history books gloss it over.

I thought to myself: 'Is the pain a little less than when I went away?' and tried to persuade myself that it was so.

He laughed again: the horror of the world lay like infection in his throat.

Perhaps all life was like that--dull and then a heroic flurry at the end.

It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin--only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it.