Quotes from Graham Greene

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

When we are not sure, we are alive.

At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.

It is the storytellers task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.

The world doesn't make any heroes anymore.