Quotes from Graham Greene

Whew,' he said, 'I'm glad that's over, Thomas. I've been feeling awfully bad about it.' It was only too evident that he no longer did.

What will we care for the why and the wherefore?

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, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.' He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him.

The thought of retirement set his nerves twitching and straining: he always prayed that death would come first.

Hullo, commandant,' I said, 'how's the General?' 'Which general?' he asked with a shy grin. 'Surely in the Caodaist faith,' I said, 'all generals are reconciled.

The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic.

She was his like a table or a chair, but a table owned you, too - by your fingerprints.

Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful and in his trade my father was a success. If a client didn't like my father's manner or his estimates, he could go elsewhere. My father wouldn't have cared. Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.

When you have a child you are condemned to be a father for life. They go away from you. You can't go away from them.

You have a sense of humour. I am in favor of jokes. They have political value. Jokes are a release for the cowardly and the impotent.

He sat heavily down on a tall tubular adjustable chair, which shortened suddenly under his weight and split him on the floor. Somebody always leaves a banana-skin on the scene of a tragedy.

There are men whom one has an irresistible desire to tease: men whose virtues one doesn't share.

He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?

New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one.

Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round.

Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.

He had received already a larger dose of life than he had bargained for, and he was scared.

I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations… I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but 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, like the pain of an amputated leg no longer there.

D. felt a little envious of him as he stood there in the yard among the cars — he looked established. Five hundred years of inbreeding had produced him, set him against an exact background, made him at home, and at the same a time haunted — by the vices of ancestors and the tastes of the past.

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour.

They killed him because he was too innocent to live.

In a common situation, I suppose we all behave much alike and use the same words.