Quotes By Graham Greene

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.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.

Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.

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.

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

The world doesn't make any heroes anymore.

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

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.

Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.

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.

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

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.

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.

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.

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Failure too is a form of death.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

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.

They are always saying God loves us. If that's love I'd rather have a bit of kindness.

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

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.

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.