Quotes from Graham Greene

All, Pyle? Wait until you're afraid of living ten years alone with no companion and a nursing home at the end of it. THen you'll start running in any direction, even away from that girl in the red dressing-gown, to find someone, anyone, who last until you are through.

The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference; the doubter fights only with himself.

She always harboured my criticism: it was only praise that slid from her like the snow.

He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.

to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory...

In the strict sense I would not call him a writer at all. (...) Crabbin said, He was just a popular entertainer. Why the hell not? Martins said fiercely. Oh well, I merely meant... What was Shakespeare?

The main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author, they come out of his body as a child comes from the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut, and they grow into independence. The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in.

As long as there is a Church, there will be little Torquemadas

A frigid woman is never jealous, you simply haven't caught up yet on ordinary human emotions.

What's the good? he'll always be innocent, you can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.

But we do not love people for what they do for us. Love happens to us; it isn't created.

The thought of retirement set his nerves twitching and straining: he always prayed that death would come first.