Quotes About Graham Greene

You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.' Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.

You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.

more earth-bound fiction and especially to shake off the 'Catholic novelist' tag, which first took hold with Brighton Rock; Greene would often say that he was 'not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be a Catholic'.3 A memorable phrase, it is more accurate as a description of the second half of his career than of the first. Indeed, it seems that the middle-aged Graham Greene was trying to cover his intellectual and artistic tracks.

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.

Small wonder that so many English writers have preferred the dramatic certainties of Catholicism. You simply couldn't write a novel like Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory about a church built on the conviction that anything can be settled over a cup of tea.

I understand Gil has a quote by Graham Greene on his chest," Renée said. She was studying a bit of wet snow as it slid off the tip of one boot. Her voice was calculatedly indifferent. "Something about the nature of imprisonment.

[Graham Greenes] ability to encapsulate the essence of an exotic setting in a single book is exemplified in The Heart of the Matter (1948); his contemporary Evelyn Waugh stated that the West Africa of that book replaced the true remembered West Africa of his own experience.

With Graham Greene life is a precious, perpetual, snot-sodden whinge.

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.

I am a Graham Greene fan - I'm just a ferocious reader. I read an awful lot when I get the time.

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.

Graham Greene, a wartime intelligence officer in West Africa, based his novel Our Man in Havana, about a spy who invents an entire network of bogus informants, on the Garbo story.

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.

Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow, Aunt Augusta said, like some people are only bearable under a sheet.

I couldn't resist the temptation to tease Pyle - it is, after all, the weapon of weakness and I was weak.

A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.

I have to think of all the possibilities, doctor. Even a crime of passion is possible.' 'Passion?' the doctor smiled. 'I am an Englishman.

I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate,...

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.