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 GREENEEternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.
More Graham Greene Quotes
-
-
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 -
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
GRAHAM GREENE -
Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn’t being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love–it’s being unhappy together.
GRAHAM GREENE -
I aim to be content with what I produce. It’s an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.
GRAHAM GREENE -
An autobiography is only ‘a sort of life’ – it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.
GRAHAM GREENE -
She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.
GRAHAM GREENE -
Sooner or later; one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.
GRAHAM GREENE -
Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.
GRAHAM GREENE -
In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.
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 -
There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.
GRAHAM GREENE -
All good novelists have bad memories.
GRAHAM GREENE -
Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
GRAHAM GREENE -
It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.
GRAHAM GREENE -
I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can’t love and do nothing.
GRAHAM GREENE -
There’s a virtue in slowness, which we have lost.
GRAHAM GREENE -
You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.
GRAHAM GREENE -
Destruction after all is a form of creation.
GRAHAM GREENE -
In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
GRAHAM GREENE -
Most things disappoint till you look deeper.
GRAHAM GREENE -
God save us always,’ I said ‘from the innocent and the good.
GRAHAM GREENE -
Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
GRAHAM GREENE -
All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.
GRAHAM GREENE -
We forget very easily what gives us pain.
GRAHAM GREENE -
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 -
The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.
GRAHAM GREENE