Graham Greene Quotes

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Graham Greene

Profession : Novelist

Birth : October 2, 1904

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

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

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

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

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

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene

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

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

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

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

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

Graham Greene

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

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

The world doesn't make any heroes anymore.

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

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.

Graham Greene

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

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