Quotes from Graham Greene

You cannot control what you love--you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.

I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.

My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.

O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.

I had committed myself: without love I'd have to go through the gestures of love.

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

For God's sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn't just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.

one gets so hopelessly tired of deception.

Hatred seems to operate on the same glands as love; it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.

A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.

Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water, like Pilate.

At the end of what is called the 'sexual life' the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

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

No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

A man kept his character even when he was insane.

Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.

Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.

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 a human condition

Media is a word that has come to mean bad journalism

I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It's the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.