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(no category)
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If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A. , I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.
-Graham Greene
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Appearance
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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
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Books
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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
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Certainty
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When we are not sure, we are alive.
-Graham Greene
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Children
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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
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Comedy
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We mustn't complain too much of being comedians -- it's an honorable 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
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Communism
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Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politick. Catholics and Communists have committed 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.
-Graham Greene
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Corruption
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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
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Cynicism
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Cynicism is cheap -- you can buy it at any Monoprix store -- it's built into all poor-quality goods.
-Graham Greene
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Death
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We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
-Graham Greene
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Deception/Lying
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He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.
-Graham Greene
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In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
-Graham Greene
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Despair
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Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.
-Graham Greene
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Emotions
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Sentimentality--that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.
-Graham Greene
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Evolution
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God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed -- that is the meaning of evolution.
-Graham Greene
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Failure
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Failure too is a form of death...
-Graham Greene
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Faith
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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
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Happiness
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Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil --or else an absolute ignorance.
-Graham Greene
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Humor
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His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse.
-Graham Greene
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Innocence
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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
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Journalism
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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
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Media
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Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.
-Graham Greene
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Money
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People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.
-Graham Greene
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Morals
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Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
-Graham Greene
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Murder
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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
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Books by and about Graham Greene