Quotes from Graham Greene

There are men whom one has an irresistible desire to tease: men whose virtues one doesn't share.

I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations… I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

In the moment of shock there is little pain; pain began about three a.m., when I began to plan the life I had still somehow to live and to remember memories in order somehow to eliminate them. Happy memories are the worst, and I tried to remember the unhappy. I was practiced. I had lived all this before. I knew I could do what was necessary, but I was so much older—I felt I had little energy left to reconstruct.

Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men

Whims so often end in bankruptcy.

You can be certain of what you've done, you can judge death, but to save a man — that takes more than six years of training, and in the end you can never be quite sure that it was you who saved him.

There was not much one could do; he decided at least to be good.

I want ordinary corrupt human love

There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love it when on finds it.

There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love it when one finds it.

So much of a novelist's writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

Henry was living in a terrible insecurity. To that extent his plight was worse than mine. I had the security of possessing nothing.