Quotes from Graham Greene

For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you – with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell – can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it's not so difficult to be a saint. It's something He can demand of any of us, leap.

You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.' 2

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else, an absolute ignorance.

My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action-even an opinion is a kind of action.

If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures — you had to kill yourself among the graves.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.

I tossed up whether I'd see [the critic] or not: I knew too well the pompous phrases of his article, the buried significance he would discover of which I was unaware and the faults I was tired of facing.

One can go back to one's own home after a year's absence and immediately the door closes it is as if one had never been away. Or one can go back after a few hours and everything is so changed that one is a stranger.

Can't one love or hate, I broke out at him, as long as that? Don't make any mistake. I'm just another of your jealous clients, I don't claim to be any different fro m the rest,but there's been a time-lag in my case.

In Gower Street they were sweeping up glass, and a building smoked into the new day like a candle which some late reveler had forgotten to snuff.

Nunca nos acostumbramos a ser menos importantes para los demás de lo que ellos lo son para nosotros.

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 situation

There are times, aren't there, when Shakespeare is a little dull.

The act of lust and the act of love are the same; it cannot be falsified like a sentiment.

I think, for the writer, rather as for the priest, there isn't such a thing as success.

I don't believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.

Cuando somos jóvenes somos una jungla de complicaciones. Nos simplificamos a medida que envejecemos.

Cuando uno se escapa a un desierto el silencio te grita en los oídos.

El sufrimiento no aumenta por el número: un cuerpo puede contener todo el sufrimiento que puede sentir el mundo.

When we get to the end of human beings we have to delude ourselves into a belief in God, like a gourmet who demands more complex sauces with his food.

How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a God made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as air.

All, Pyle? Wait until you're afraid of living ten years alone with no companion and a nursing home at the end of it. THen you'll start running in any direction, even away from that girl in the red dressing-gown, to find someone, anyone, who last until you are through.

Opium makes you quick-witted - perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so important.

The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference; the doubter fights only with himself.