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Graham Greene Quotes
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Henry Graham Greene , better known by his pen name Graham Greene, was an English novelist 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 writings, which included over 25 novels, he explored the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world, often through a Catholic perspective.

Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist, rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair; which have been named "the gold standard" of the Catholic novel. Several works, such as The Confidential Agent, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Human Factor, and his screenplay for The Third Man, also show Greene's avid interest in the workings and intrigues of international politics and espionage.

Greene was born in Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire into a large, influential family that included the owners of the Greene King Brewery. He boarded at Berkhamsted School in Hertfordshire, where his father taught and became headmaster. Unhappy at the school, he attempted suicide several times. He attended Balliol College, Oxford, to study history, where, while an undergraduate, he published his first work in 1925—a poorly received volume of poetry, Babbling April. After graduating, Greene worked first as a private tutor and then as a journalist—first on the Nottingham Journal and then as a sub-editor on The Times. He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He published his first novel, The Man Within, in 1929; its favourable reception enabled him to work full-time as a novelist. He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, and book and film reviews. His 1937 film review of Wee Willie Winkie , commented on the sexuality of the nine-year-old star, Shirley Temple. This provoked Twentieth Century Fox to sue, prompting Greene to live in Mexico until after the trial was over. While in Mexico, Greene developed the ideas for The Power and the Glory. Greene originally divided his fiction into two genres : thrillers—often with notable philosophic edges—such as The Ministry of Fear; and literary works—on which he thought his literary reputation would rest—such as The Power and the Glory.

Greene had a history of depression, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life. In a letter to his wife, Vivien, he told her that he had "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life," and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material." William Golding praised Greene as "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety." He died in 1991, at age 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery. Wikipedia  

✵ 2. October 1904 – 3. April 1991
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Graham Greene: 164 quotes35 likes

Graham Greene Quotes

“Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Source: The Ministry of Fear

“He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.”

Graham Greene book The Heart of the Matter

Source: The Heart of the Matter

“He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.”

Graham Greene

Source: Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party

“We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us — Martins felt the little jab of dispensability.”

Graham Greene book The Third Man

Source: The Third Man (1949)

“In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.”

Graham Greene book The Heart of the Matter

Source: The Heart of the Matter

“A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Source: Brighton Rock

“Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Source: The Ministry of Fear

“Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.”

Graham Greene

“All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.”

Graham Greene The Tenth Man

Source: The Tenth Man

“What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“[Ida] "…It's a good world if you don't weaken."”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Source: Brighton Rock (1938)

“There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“I couldn't help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I've forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.”

Graham Greene book Our Man in Havana

Our Man in Havana (1958)

“A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.”

Graham Greene book The Heart of the Matter

Source: The Heart of the Matter

“When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“The old lady knelt, saying her 'Hail Mary'; She didn't believe — but among Catholics even the sceptical are courteous.”

Graham Greene book The Lawless Roads

The Lawless Roads (1939)

“It was not the kind of surroundings in which any one with free will — if such a man existed — would have chosen to await death.”

Graham Greene book The Honorary Consul

The Honorary Consul (1973)

“The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief.”

Graham Greene

(8 July 1987) Reported in Leopoldo Duran, Graham Greene: An intimate portrait by his closest friend and confidant, translated by Euan Cameron. HarperCollins, 1994, p. 97

“We mustn’t complain too much of being comedians—it’s an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed—that’s all. We are bad comedians, we aren’t bad men.”

Graham Greene book The Comedians

Pt. 1, ch. 5, sct. 2
The Comedians (1966)

“Perhaps his laughter saved them — it must be difficult to shoot a laughing man: you have to feel important to kill.”

Graham Greene book The Lawless Roads

The Lawless Roads (1939)

“You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?”

Graham Greene book Monsignor Quixote

On a priest who pantomimes Mass, Monsignor Quixote, PBS TV (February 13, 1987)

“Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 1, ch. 1
The End of the Affair (1951)

“To me comfort is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 1, ch. 1
The End of the Affair (1951)

“[After Hale's cremation] She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens. Fred dropped indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

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

Graham Greene book A Sort of Life

A Sort of Life, ch. 7, sct. 1 (1971)

“I suppose the love of life which periodically deserts most men was returning: like sexual desire, it moves in cycles.”

Graham Greene book The Lawless Roads

The Lawless Roads (1939)

“Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps — violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on.”

Graham Greene book The Lawless Roads

The Lawless Roads (1939)

“The hurt is in the act of possession; we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Pt. II, ch. 3
The Quiet American (1955)

“We do not choose our concerns.”

Graham Greene book The Third Man

The Third Man (1949)

“God…created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed — that is the meaning of evolution.”

Graham Greene book Travels with My Aunt

Pt. 2, ch. 7
Travels with My Aunt (1969)

“That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.”

Graham Greene

Getting to know the General (1984)

“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 book The Ministry of Fear

Bk. 1, ch. 7, sct. 1
The Ministry of Fear (1943)

“[Cubitt hurling insults at Pinky after he refuses to lend him money] The picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ, the image of their own sentimentality. …He was like a professor describing to a stranger some place he had only read in books:…when all the time it was a country the stranger knew…”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“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

International Herald Tribune (October 7, 1977)

“Have you seen a room from which faith has gone?…Like a marriage from which love has gone…And patience, patience everywhere like a fog.”

Graham Greene The Potting Shed

The Potting Shed (1957)

“…the Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned: life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I'll spoil your looks.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“Those who marry God can become domesticated too—it’s just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word “Love” means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and “Ave Maria” like “dearest” is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world’s marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves—it was God’s taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.”

Graham Greene book A Burnt-Out Case

Pt. 1, ch. 1, sct. 2
A Burnt-Out Case (1960)

“[Rose, taken out for the evening by Pinkie] She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present – she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but not there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel – the end of love. That was being worked out not, like a story: the pointed word that sent her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 1, ch. 6
The End of the Affair (1951)

“He knew everything in theory, nothing in practice… He knew the moves, he'd never played the game.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)