Graham Greene
Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene OM CH, better known by his pen name Graham Greene, was an English novelist and author regarded by some as one of the great writers of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers. He was shortlisted, in 1967, for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through 67 years of writings, which included over 25 novels, he...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 October 1904
Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?
People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.
Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.
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.
Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.
I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you.
I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.
When we are not sure, we are alive.
Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.
Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.
In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
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.
Innocence is a kind of insanity