Quotes About Graham Greene

In the strict sense I would not call him a writer at all. (...) Crabbin said, He was just a popular entertainer. Why the hell not? Martins said fiercely. Oh well, I merely meant... What was Shakespeare?

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

You said just now that irony was a valuable literary quality. But you aren't a novel, she said.

I was a correspondent: I thought in headlines.

But it wasn't the small Ministry to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution. It was a Ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged. If one loved one feared.

There are no coroners in Paraguay.

Age, Henry, may a little modify our emotions— it does not destroy them.

Unlike him, she retained a kind of hope. Hope is an instinct only the reasoning mind can kill. An animal never knows despair.

The vultures group themselves on the roof like pigeons: tiny moron head, long necks, faces like Carnival masks, and dusty plumages, peering this and that attentively for death.

She loved him whatever that meant but love was not an eternal

All my conversations with Pyle seemed to take grotesque directions. Was it because of his sincerity that they so ran off the customary rails? His conversations never took the corners.

A big wardrobe stood open and two white suits hung there like the last teeth in an old mouth.

He looked around the church, at the altar, the tabernacle, the brass candles, and the European saints, pale like albinos in the dark continent.

Those doubts you have I can assure you I know them too. But couldn't we perhaps go over together the philosophical arguments ... to help us both?

penalties of the ecclesiastical kind began to seem unreal in a state where the only penalty was the civil one of death.

I suppose it was only one more indication of a human being's capacity for self-deception, our baseless optimism that is so much more appalling than our despair.

How much treachery is always nourished in little overworked centres of somebody else's idealism

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

All right. I know I'm behaving badly, and I'm going to go on behaving badly. This is a situation where people do behave badly.

Didn't he posses in the end the winning cards - the cars of gentleness, humility and trust.

What about a Luger ? I suppose you had a Luger. Or an explosive fountain pen ? No. We've never been very James Bond minded here. I wasn't allowed to carry a gun, and my only car was a secondhand Morris Minor.

Sar-ah,' he called. 'Sar-ah,' spacing the syllables with an unbearable falsity.

When I looked at him I could see all the delegates sitting there between his ribs and the chief speaker rising and saying, "Freedom is of importance to creative writers." It was very uncanny at breakfast.

Of John Le Carre's books, I've only read 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,' and I haven't read anything by Graham Greene, but I've heard a great deal about how 'Your Republic Is Calling You' reminded English readers of those two writers. I don't really have any particular interest in Cold War spy novels.