Graham Greene Quotes

“He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.”
― Graham Greene, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party

“The more bare a life is, the more we fear change.”
― Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case

“Sweat cleaned you as effectively as water. But this was the race which had invented the proverb that cleanliness was next to godliness - cleanliness, not purity.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“We praise heroes as though they are rare, and yet we are always ready to blame another man for lack of heroism.”
― Graham Greene, The Last Word and Other Stories

“I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy.”
― Graham Greene, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party

“It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self- pity why it was that the pulse of his brother's fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more--darkness.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Party

“There were occasions when Shakespeare was a very bad writer indeed. You can see how often in books of quotations. People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“-"-A book takes me a year to write. It's too hard work for a revenge."
-"If you knew how little you had to revenge...".”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“As one grows old I think one becomes more attached to family things- to houses and graves.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“Age, Henry, may a little modify our emotions— it does not destroy them.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“Nadie puede soportar que no lo perdonen. Ese es el privilegio de Dios.”
― Graham Greene

“Perhaps we were looking strained in our manner, because I noticed we had attracted the attention of a little man who sat on a sofa not far off. I tried to outstare him and that was easy. He had a long moustache and fawn-like eyes and he looked hurriedly away: his elbow caught his glass of beer and spun it on to the floor, so that he was overcome with confusion. I was sorry then because it occurred to me that he might have recognized me from my photographs: he might even be one of my few readers. He had a small boy sitting with him, and what a cruel thing it is to humiliate a father in the presence of his son. The boy blushed scarlet when the waiter hurried forward, and his father began to apologize with unnecessary vehemence.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.”
― Graham Greene

“The human liver, unless it is Graham Greene's, can take so much and no more.”
― Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God

“I have always liked fat men. They have given up all unnecessary effort, for they have had the sense to realize that women do not, as men do, fall in love with physical beauty. It's easier to feel at home with a fat man.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“He was a man one always forgot. To this day I cannot describe him, except his fatness and his powdered clean-shaven cheeks and his big laugh; all his identity escapes me - except that he was called Joe. There are some men whose names are always shortened.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“Mr Chou cleared his throat, but it was only for an immense expectoration into a tin spittoon decorated with pink blooms. The baby rolled up and down among the tea-dregs and the cat leapt from a cardboard box on to a suitcase.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“It would be better if I called you,’ she told me, and caution, I thought,
caution, how well she knows how to conduct an affair like this, and I
remembered again the stair that always - ‘always’ was the phrase she had
used -squeaked.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I spent more time than was strictly necessary in the plush red corridors of the Hotel Metropole in Hanoi. For some reason, I had convinced myself that I needed to see the inside of suite 228, which was otherwise referred to in the voluminous hotel literature as "the Graham Greene Suite." Greene, whom I had been mildly fixated on for some time, had stayed there during the fifties. I was staying next door in suite 226, and after several days of wondering how I was going to get into his room, I noticed the maid's cart outside. When she finally ducked out to refill her stash of aloe shampoo and little almond soaps, I slipped through the half-opened door. Inside was a bare mahogany desk, a brass lamp, a king-size bed with a modern, striped duvet, and several spindly French sofas, also striped. I couldn't help feeling vastly let down. The setting was devoid of both Greene's seediness - he later regretted popularising the word "seedy" - and his elegance, which should not, of course, have come as a surprise. The Metropole was gutted after the war and rebuilt. And even if it hadn't been, I knew from experience that this sort of literary pilgrimage is always anticlimactic: the writer is dead and what remains of him is in his books.”
― Katie Roiphe, In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays

“The British novelist Graham Greene, for instance, whose novels include The End of the Affair and The Quiet American, was said to write 500 words a day, no more, which he would read over just before bed, relying on his dreams and sleeping mind to continue the work.”
― Rahul Jandial MD PhD

“Graham Greene bent his quill pen to a scheming degree of delicate assembly of words. One of the most essentially committed British writers of his time, I arrogate to him the precepts of unfathomably intimate Catholic order, which, in any case, balanced his esoteric writing power, in lieu of the reverse. His language is arrantly prosy, his phrases slimly evocative of secular platitude. He was a great writer. His novel THE HEART OF THE MATTER always keeps me solemnly mute to the sanctified decibels of dawn’s silent melodies of intrusive verse. An interestingly worded, relatively sparse, prose for eremites.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu