Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Man made God in his own image, so it’s natural he should love him. You know those distorting mirrors at fairs. Man’s made a beautifying mirror too in which he sees himself lovely and powerful and just and wise. It’s his idea of himself. He recognizes himself easier than in the distorting mirror which only makes him laugh, but how he loves himself in the other.”

— Graham Greene

202. “American bankers believe in the personal touch; the teller conveys a sense that he happens to be there accidentally and he is overjoyed at the lucky chance of the encounter.”

— Graham Greene

203. “Never presume yours is a better morality.”

— Graham Greene

204. “A frigid woman is never jealous, you simply haven’t caught up yet on ordinary human emotions.”

— Graham Greene

205. “My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action – even an opinion is a kind of action.”

— Graham Greene

206. “When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It’s just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.”

— Graham Greene

207. “There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn’t shared.”

— Graham Greene

208. “It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.”

— Graham Greene

209. “What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?”

— Graham Greene

210. “Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.”

— Graham Greene

211. “For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.”

— Graham Greene

212. “All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.”

— Graham Greene

213. “I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.”

— Graham Greene

214. “There are men whom one has an irresistible desire to tease: men whose virtues one doesn’t share.”

— Graham Greene

215. “I laugh at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn’t exist – mental concepts.”

— Graham Greene

216. “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

217. “I hate your reasons. I don’t want reasons. If you see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say – pain is a good thing, perhaps he’ll be better for it one day. I want to let my heart speak... Yes. At the end of a gun.”

— Graham Greene

218. “A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced.”

— Graham Greene

219. “The gulls swept over Dover. They sailed out like flakes of the fog, and tacked back towards the hidden town, while the siren mourned with them: other ships replied, a whole wake lifted up their voices – for whose death?”

— Graham Greene

220. “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

221. “Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It’s only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.”

— Graham Greene

222. “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

223. “What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?”

— Graham Greene

224. “She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

226. “I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.”

— Graham Greene

227. “I had come into this affair with my eyes open, knowing that one day this must end, and yet, when the sense of insecurity, the logical belief in the hopeless future descended like melancholia, I would badger her and badger her, as though I wanted to bring the future in now at the door, an unwanted and premature guest.”

— Graham Greene

228. “He was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes, and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it.”

— Graham Greene

229. “The main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author, they come out of his body as a child comes from the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut, and they grow into independence. The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in.”

— Graham Greene

230. “He had received already a larger dose of life than he had bargained for, and he was scared.”

— Graham Greene

231. “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

232. “The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference; the doubter fights only with himself.”

— Graham Greene

233. “For God’s sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn’t just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.”

— Graham Greene

234. “It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.”

— Graham Greene

235. “Why did you give Querry Deo Gratias?’ ‘He’s cured, but he’s a burnt-out case, and I don’t want to send him away. He can sweep a floor and make a bed without fingers or toes.’ ‘Our visitors are sometimes fastidious.’ ‘I assure you Querry doesn’t mind. In fact he asked for him.”

— Graham Greene

236. “The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so I suppose we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman...”

— Graham Greene

237. “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

238. “I like to change my clothes as little as possible. I suppose some people would say the same of my ideas, the bank had taught me to be wary of whims.”

— Graham Greene

239. “Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn’t know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.”

— Graham Greene

240. “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

241. “The Church is in the world, it is part of the suffering in the world, and though Christ condemned the disciple who struck off the ear of the high priest’s servant, our hearts go out in sympathy to all who are moved to violence by the suffering of others. The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never. One is an imperfection of charity, the other the perfection of egoism.”

— Graham Greene

242. “Don’t you believe it. I’ll tell you what life is. It’s gaol, it’s not knowing where to get some money. Worms and cataract, cancer. You hear ’em shrieking from the upper windows- children being born. It’s dying slowly.”

— Graham Greene

243. “In a common situation, I suppose we all behave much alike and use the same words.”

— Graham Greene

244. “Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.”

— Graham Greene

245. “It’s strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum’s swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.”

— Graham Greene

246. “Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow,” Aunt Augusta said, “like some people are only bearable under a sheet.”

— Graham Greene

247. “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

248. “I have never planned anything illegal in my life,′ Aunt Augusta said. ‘How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?”

— Graham Greene

249. “The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety.”

— Graham Greene

250. “She was his like a table or a chair, but a table owned you, too – by your fingerprints.”

— Graham Greene