Quotes from Graham Greene

I have always liked fat men. They have given up all unnecessary effort, for they have had the sense to realize that women do not, as men do, fall in love with physical beauty. Curran was stout and so was your father. It's easier to feel at home with a fat man.

In one great case a man [Winston Churchill] who had been considered too brilliant and too reckless ever to be trusted with major office was the leader of the country [1941]. One of Rowe's last memories was of hearing him hissed by ex-servicemen from the public gallery of a law court because he had told an abrupt unpalatable truth about an old campaign. Now he had taught the country to love his unpalatable truths.

Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see—every scrap

It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action—even an opinion is a kind of action.

Fear is easily experienced, but fun is hard to come by in old age, so I already felt a sense of gratitude to General Omar Torrijos.

If I eliminate everything, how will I exist?

You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us... But if you are interested in life it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of the cheese.

If I could suffer like you, I could heal like you.

The more we know the more we love.

What strange ideas people have about leprosy, doctor.'     'They learn it from the Bible. Like sex.'     'It's a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible

Marcel, I know I'm an old woman and as you say a bit of an actress. But please go on pretending. As long as we pretend we escape. Pretend that I love you like a mistress. Pretend that you love me like a lover. Pretend that I would die for you and that you would die for me.' I read the message again now; I thought it movingly phrased . . . And he had died for her, so perhaps he was no comédien after all. Death is a proof of sincerity.