Top 276 Quotes & Sayings by Graham Greene

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British novelist Graham Greene.

Last updated on November 25, 2024.

Henry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading English novelists of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers. He was shortlisted, in 1966 and 1967, for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. He was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize.

British - Novelist | October 2, 1904 - April 3, 1991

Source: Wikipedia

The world doesn't make any heroes anymore.

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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.

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.

Graham Greene

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.

Graham Greene

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.

Graham Greene

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?

Graham Greene

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

Graham Greene

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Graham Greene

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.

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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.

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

Graham Greene

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.

Graham Greene

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

Graham Greene

Failure too is a form of death.

Graham Greene

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.

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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.

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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.

Graham Greene

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.

Graham Greene

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.

Graham Greene

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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.

Graham Greene

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

Graham Greene

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.

Graham Greene

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.

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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.

Graham Greene

When we are not sure, we are alive.

Graham Greene

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

Graham Greene

They are always saying God loves us. If that's love I'd rather have a bit of kindness.

Graham Greene

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

Graham Greene

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Graham Greene

In the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

Graham Greene

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Graham Greene

Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.

Graham Greene

Sweet are the thoughts that savor of content: the quiet mind is richer than a crown.

Graham Greene

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

Graham Greene

Most things disappoint till you look deeper.

Graham Greene

One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

Graham Greene

People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations

Graham Greene

There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost

Graham Greene

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity.

Graham Greene