717 Quotes by Graham Greene

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .

What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.

A first reading is something special, like first love.

...What strange ideas people have about leprosy, doctor.'    'They learn it from the Bible. Like sex.'    'It's a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible

I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced