Quotes from Graham Greene

I'm not involved, not involved, I repeated. It has been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. 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.

When you reach a certain age you don't care about the future: it is success enough to be alive: every morning you wake with triumph. (p. 91)

Then he allowed himself to strike, like his childhood hero Allan Quatermain, off on that long slow underground stream which bore him on toward the interior of the dark continent where he hoped that he might find a permanent home, in a city where he could be accepted as a citizen, as a citizen without any pledge of faith, not the City of God or Marx, but the city called Peace of Mind.

He had opened the book at random several times, seeking a sortes Virgilianae, before he chose the sentences on which his code was to be based. 'You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall.' It was as if in choosing that passage, he were transmitting a signal of defiance to both the services. The last word of the message, when it was decoded by Boris or another, would read 'goodbye.

She always harboured my criticism: it was only praise that slid from her like the snow.

The Minister had a great respect for Pyle - Pyle had taken a good degree in - well, one of those subjects Americans can take degrees in: perhaps public relations or theatrecraft, perhaps even Far Eastern studies (he had read a lot of books).

An artist paints his picture not in a few hours but in all the years of experience before he takes up the brush, and it is the same with failure.

He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.

You are lovely, brilliant, witty...the incredible words which would relieve her of any need to repay him or refuse his gifts; loveliness and wit were priced higher than any gift he offered, while if a girl were loved, even old women of hard experience would admit her right to take and never give.

I hate your reasons. I don't want reasons. If you see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say - pain is a good thing, perhaps he'll be better for it one day. I want to let my heart speak... Yes. At the end of a gun.

to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory...

She wasn't religious. She didn't believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers

The Captain turned away from the mirror and said, 'Thank God, I'm not in danger of prison here. I'm only in danger of death.

In the strict sense I would not call him a writer at all. (...) Crabbin said, He was just a popular entertainer. Why the hell not? Martins said fiercely. Oh well, I merely meant... What was Shakespeare?

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. All my life I've tried to live that illusion.

The soap-box orators talked in the bitter cold at Marble Arch with their mackintoshes turned up around their Adam's apples, and all down the road the cad cars waited for the right easy girls, and the cheap prostitutes sat hopelessly in the shadows, and the blackmailers kept an eye open on the grass where the deeds of darkness were quietly and unsatisfactorily accomplished.

I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.

A first reading is something special, like first love.

for aren't lovers nearly always innocent? They have committed no crime, they are certain in their own minds that they have done no wrong, 'as long as no one but myself is hurt', the old tag is ready on their lips, and love, of course, excuses everything—so they believe, and so I used to believe in the days when I loved.

It was like hate on a deathbed.

It's easier to get over a thing Scobie said, if you talk about it

Human love can be only a pale reflection of the emotion that God must feel for what He has created

There is a time in life when a man with a little acting ability is able to deceive even himself.

The main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author, they come out of his body as a child comes from the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut, and they grow into independence. The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in.