Graham Greene (1904–91,) fully Henry Graham Greene, was an English novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist. He is celebrated for his novels and psychological thrillers that take up life’s moralities and amoralities in the context of contemporary political settings.
Born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, Greene was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1926.
Greene published a book of verse, Babbling April (1925,) while still in Oxford, and followed it with a historical novel, The Man Within (1929.) After that, he produced a series of thrillers he termed “entertainments”—Stamboul Train (1932,) It’s a Battlefield (1934,) England Made Me (1935,) and The Third Man (1949; film starring Orson Welles, 1949.)
Increasingly Greene explored the world of Catholic remorse and redemption in Brighton Rock (1938,) The Power and the Glory (1940,) The Heart of the Matter (1948,) The End of the Affair (1951,) and The Quiet American (1955.)
Greene also wrote verse, travel books, short stories, children’s stories, and plays. His autobiographies are A Sort of Life (1971) and Ways of Escape (1980.)
The English novelist and biographer Norman Sherry wrote the acclaimed biography, The Life of Graham Greene (3 vols., 1989–2005.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Graham Greene
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Childhood, Youth
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
Topics: Socialism, Communism
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
Topics: Money, Misery
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
Topics: Faith
I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It’s the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.
—Graham Greene
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
Topics: Murder
We’d forgive most things if we knew the facts.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Determination
His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Jokes, Humor
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
Topics: Challenges, Wine, Alcohol
We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Death
He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Lies, Lying, Deception/Lying
In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Deception/Lying, Lying, Lies
Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Simplicity
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
It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Feelings, Trust
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
Topics: Corruption, Defects
Failure too is a form of death…
—Graham Greene
Topics: Failure
God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed—that is the meaning of evolution.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Meaning, Evolution
When we are not sure, we are alive.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Uncertainty, Ignorance, Doubt, Certainty
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
Topics: Children
Cynicism is cheap—you can buy it at any Monoprix store—it’s built into all poor-quality goods.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Cynicism
Those who marry God can become domesticated too—it’s just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word Love means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and Ave Maria like dearest is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world’s marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves—it was God’s taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Religion
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
Topics: Innocence
A treasure is to be valued for its own sake and not for what it will buy.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Money
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
Topics: Comedy
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
Topics: Appearance
You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?
—Graham Greene
Topics: Difficulty
Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Morals, Curiosity, Morality
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Confidence, Self-reliance
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
Topics: Literature, Books
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