Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?”

— Graham Greene

202. “Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

204. “When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end.”

— Graham Greene

205. “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

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

— Graham Greene

207. “If I were writing a novel I would end it here: a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I’m beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here.”

— Graham Greene

208. “Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven’t even got a self to express.”

— Graham Greene

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Graham Greene

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Graham Greene

226. “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

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

— Graham Greene

228. “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

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

— Graham Greene

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Graham Greene

234. “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

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

— Graham Greene

236. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “Doing nothing, badly.”

— Graham Greene

244. “I could have waited years, now that I knew the end of the story. I was cold and wet and very happy. I could even look with charity towards the altar and the figure dangling there. She loves us both, I thought, but if there is to be a conflict between an image and a man, I know who will win. I could put my hand on her thigh or my mouth on her breast; he was imprisoned behind the altar and couldn’t move to plead his cause.”

— Graham Greene

245. “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

246. “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

247. “It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin – only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it.”

— Graham Greene

248. “His question reminded me of how easy he had been to deceive, so easy that he seemed to me almost a conniver at his wife’s unfaithfulness, as the man who leaves loose banknotes in a hotel bedroom connives at theft, and I hated him for the very quality which had once helped my love.”

— Graham Greene

249. “I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and fires and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert.”

— Graham Greene

250. “What are others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being?”

— Graham Greene