Graham Greene

"I want so much to cling to something solid and steady."

"Greene, we agreed, is a Jekyll and Hyde character, who has not succeeded in fusing the two sides of himself into any kind of harmony. There is conflict within him, and therefore he is liable to pursue conflict without."

"Barbara wrote that his brain frightened her. It was sharp and clear and cruel. She admired him for being always unsentimental, but noted 'always remember to rely on yourself … if you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you.'"

"In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds — to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it — while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate — or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems."

"Have you seen a room from which faith has gone?...Like a marriage from which love has gone...And patience, patience everywhere like a fog."

"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. Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved."

"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."

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

"My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane."

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition."

"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."

"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought."

"The world is not black and white. More like black and grey."

"That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer."

"A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious."

"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."

"You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?"

"The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief."

"Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline."

"There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love when one finds it."

"[Re Hale] He only felt his loneliness after his third gin."

"[Ida] "...It's a good world if you don't weaken.""

"… it was the little things which tripped you up."

"[Priest at Hale's cremation] "...our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit.""

"[After Hale's cremation] She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens. Fred dropped indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept."

"Man is made by the places in which he lives..."

"[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe'."

"[About Pinkie's inability to empathise] The imagination hadn't awoken. That was his strength. He couldn't see through other people's eyes, or feel with their nerves. Only the music made him uneasy."

"[Rose, taken out for the evening by Pinkie] She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present – she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation."

"You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God."

"...the Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned: life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I'll spoil your looks."

"...he knew there wasn't a soul in the mob he could trust – except perhaps Dallow. That didn't matter. You couldn't make mistakes when you trusted nobody."

"Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises ..."

"He knew everything in theory, nothing in practice... He knew the moves, he'd never played the game."

"People talk," Ida Arnold said. "People talk all the time."

"[Cubitt hurling insults at Pinky after he refuses to lend him money] The picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ, the image of their own sentimentality. ...He was like a professor describing to a stranger some place he had only read in books:...when all the time it was a country the stranger knew..."

"Perhaps his laughter saved them — it must be difficult to shoot a laughing man: you have to feel important to kill."

"Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps — violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on."

"The old lady knelt, saying her 'Hail Mary'; She didn't believe — but among Catholics even the sceptical are courteous."

"But the great moment was over — here in Orizaba it was like Galilee between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection — all the enthusiasm had been spent."

"I suppose the love of life which periodically deserts most men was returning: like sexual desire, it moves in cycles."

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

"When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity— that was a quality God's image carried with it."

"Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?"

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

"Thrillers are like life—more like life than you are … it’s what we’ve all made of the world."

"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."

"In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality — heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. 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."

"People don't like reality, they don't like common sense, until age forces it on them."

"The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action."