717 Quotes by Graham Greene

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.

For a good man fame is always a problem.

When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.

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

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.

Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?

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. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the thape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.