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
Cynicism is cheap—you can buy it at any Monoprix store—it’s built into all poor-quality goods.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Cynicism
Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Reality
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
Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Morality, Morals
God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed—that is the meaning of evolution.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Evolution, Meaning
Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Happiness
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
Sentimentality—that’s what we call the sentiment we don’t share.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Emotions
We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Death
When we are not sure, we are alive.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Uncertainty, Ignorance, Doubt, Certainty
However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Suicide
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
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
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
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
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
Topics: Journalism
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Youth, Childhood
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
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
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
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Despair, Awareness, Acceptance, Realistic Expectations, Realization
In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Deception/Lying, Lies
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Self-reliance, Confidence
You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?
—Graham Greene
Topics: Difficulty
Failure too is a form of death…
—Graham Greene
Topics: Failure
He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Lies, Deception/Lying
He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness—the sense that is where we really belong.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Unhappiness
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
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
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: Communism
His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Jokes
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: Alcohol, Challenges
Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.
—Graham Greene
A treasure is to be valued for its own sake and not for what it will buy.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Money
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Dodie Smith British Novelist
Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
Gladys Bronwyn Stern British Novelist
J. B. Priestley British Novelist, Playwright, Essayist
Doris Lessing British Novelist, Poet
Agatha Christie British Novelist
William Shakespeare British Playwright
V. S. Pritchett British Short Story Writer
W. Somerset Maugham British Novelist
Arnold J. Toynbee British Historian