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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

“People don't like reality, they don't like common sense, until age forces it on them.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

The Ministry of Fear (1943)

“At the end of what is called the "sexual life" the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.”

Graham Greene book May We Borrow Your Husband?

May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967)
Short Stories

“But the great moment was over — here in Orizaba it was like Galilee between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection — all the enthusiasm had been spent.”

Graham Greene book The Lawless Roads

The Lawless Roads (1939)

“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

Letter to critic Stephen Pile, Sunday Times (London) (January 18, 1981)

“… it was the little things which tripped you up.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“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 book The Comedians

Pt. 1, ch. 4, sct. 3
The Comedians (1966)

“Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted.”

Graham Greene book The Honorary Consul

The Honorary Consul (1973)

“Thrillers are like life—more like life than you are … it’s what we’ve all made of the world.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Bk. 1, ch. 5
The Ministry of Fear (1943)

“In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality — heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

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

“The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.”

Graham Greene book The Third Man

The Third Man (1949)

“[Re Hale] He only felt his loneliness after his third gin.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“Under my cloak, a fig for the King!”

Graham Greene book Monsignor Quixote

Monsignor Quixote (1982)

“[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“Man is made by the places in which he lives…”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“People talk," Ida Arnold said. "People talk all the time.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“…he knew there wasn't a soul in the mob he could trust – except perhaps Dallow. That didn't matter. You couldn't make mistakes when you trusted nobody.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and almost forgotten.”

Graham Greene book The Honorary Consul

The Honorary Consul (1973)

“I sat on my bed and I said to God: You've taken her, but you haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair (1951)

“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 belong to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 2, ch. 1
The End of the Affair (1951)

“No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life.”

Graham Greene book The Third Man

The Third Man (1949)

“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

New York Times (October 9, 1985)

“Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory (1940)

“Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.”

Graham Greene

&quot;Freedom of Thought,&quot; speech accepting the Jerusalem Prize (6 April 1981) <br class="br"> Excerpted http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/18th-april-1981/19/books in the The Spectator (18 April 1981)

“The world is not black and white. More like black and grey.”

Graham Greene

London Observer (January 2, 1983)

“Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Pt. II, ch. 2, pg 123
The Quiet American (1955)

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity— that was a quality God's image carried with it.”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory (1940)

“In Italy, for thirty 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 five hundred years of democracy and peace - and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Graham Greene book The Third Man

The Third Man (1949)

“If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair (1951)

“I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It’s the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.”

Graham Greene book Travels with My Aunt

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

“Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.”

Graham Greene book The Honorary Consul

The Honorary Consul (1973)

“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”

Graham Greene book The Comedians

Pt. 1, ch. 4, sct. 1
The Comedians (1966)

“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. Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.”

Graham Greene

From journal kept while writing A Burnt-Out Case (1959)

“[Priest at Hale's cremation] "…our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit."”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“Reality in our century is not something to be faced.”

Graham Greene book Our Man in Havana

Pt. 1, ch. 1, sct. 1
Our Man in Havana (1958)

“Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism … is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politique…. Catholics and communists have commited great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate…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 book The Comedians

Pt. 2, ch. 4, sct. 4
The Comedians (1966)

“Can you hate something you don't believe in? And yet he called himself a free-thinker. What an impossible paradox, to be free and to be so obsessed.”

Graham Greene

"The Hint of an Explanation" (1948), Twenty-One Stories, 1954
Short Stories

“What right had I to value her less than the bodies in the square? Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel. I had judged like a journalist, in terms of quantity, and I had betrayed my own principles; I had become as engage as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decision would ever be simple again.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Pt. IV, ch. 2, pg 242
The Quiet American (1955)

“Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.”

Graham Greene book Our Man in Havana

Pt. 1, ch. 3, sct. 3
Our Man in Havana (1958)

“Cynicism is cheap—you can buy it at any Monoprix store—it’s built into all poor-quality goods.”

Graham Greene book The Comedians

Pt. 1, ch. 1, sct. 3
The Comedians (1966)

“I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and change conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. But this hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deeper than the book – the unconscious worked on it instead…”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 1, ch. 2
The End of the Affair (1951)

“[About Pinkie's inability to empathise] The imagination hadn't awoken. That was his strength. He couldn't see through other people's eyes, or feel with their nerves. Only the music made him uneasy.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.”

Graham Greene

Speech on receiving the Shakespeare Prize awarded by the University of Hamburg, Germany (1969)

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

Graham Greene

Independent (London, April 4, 1991)