10 Quotes by Henry Green

The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.

I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: ‘Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.’ I saw the book in a flash.

Prose should be a direct intimacy between strangers with no appeal to what both may have known.

If you can make the reader laugh he is apt to get careless and go on reading.

I can tell a good cowboy by the way he approaches a cow.

The miracle is that a work of art should live in the person who reads it.

But she said it so low, so quietly this time that no one followed her. Memory is a winding lane and as she went up it, waving them to follow, the first bend in it hid her from them and she was left to pick her flowers alone.

At my public school I had hated every other face for fear the owner was a lord, at university, I was to court the rich while doubting whether there should be great inequalities between incomes.

I can’t understand why people can’t go on just being ordinary to each other even if they are in love.