Graham Greene: Man

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

“And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.”

“A man kept his character even when he was insane.”

“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”