Quotes from Graham Greene

All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions.

People don't demand that a thing be reasonable if their emotions are touched.

could see so well the kind of house that has no mercy

It had 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.

They want enough rice,' I said. 'They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want.

You know, Pyle, women don't want virgins. I'm not sure we do, unless we are a pathological type.

He was a man one always forgot. To this day I cannot describe him, except his fatness and his powdered clean-shaven cheeks and his big laugh; all his identity escapes me - except that he was called Joe. There are some men whose names are always shortened.

People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.

No shots had been fired; we were alive; death had withdrawn perhaps as far as the next canal.

But what are you supposed to love, then, in the bitch and the fake? Where do you find that immortal soul they talk about? Where do you see this lovely thing in me—in me, of all people? [...] Tell me, God, and I'll set about robbing you of it forever.

There are unimportant pieces in any game.

So much of war is sitting around doing nothing, waiting for someone else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left, it doesn't seem worth starting even a train of thought.

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.

Fear is easily experienced, but fun is hard to come by in old age, so I already felt a sense of gratitude to General Omar Torrijos.

I've reached the age when sex isn't the problem so much as old age and death. I wake up with these in mind and not a woman's body. I just don't want to be alone in my last decade, that's all. I wouldn't know what to think about all day long.

No. He doesn't belong to the torturable class.'        'I didn't know there were class-distinctions in torture.'        'Dear Mr Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement.

If I eliminate everything, how will I exist?

If you don't see misery you don't believe in it

You can give anyone pain from a distance

The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: 'I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive.

He realised that for those who do not love time never stands still.

Sometimes I would wake up in the night saying, 'Take the case of the Caodaists.' Or the Hoa-Haos or the Binh Xuyen, all the private armies who sold their services for money or revenge.

You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us... But if you are interested in life it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of the cheese.

Pain belongs to you as happiness never does.