Quotes By Graham Greene

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.

When we are not sure, we are alive.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.

The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.

Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.

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.

I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.

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

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

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

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.

Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

The world doesn't make any heroes anymore.

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.

Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.