That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer. — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form. — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness? — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
“-"-A book takes me a year to write. It's too hard work for a revenge." -"If you knew how little you had… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
“I think, for the writer, rather as for the priest, there isn't such a thing as success.” — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
I aim to be content with what I produce. It's an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
“Everyday life seems so permanent and unshakable‒but, as I was reminded by these writers, it can be destroyed by a single phone… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
“I ought to write funny books. Life is really too horribly funny, but unless one's an outsider looking on, it's all such… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
“It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
“With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise; on the other… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
I write about situations that are common, universal might be more correct, in which my characters are involved and from which only… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
Sometimes I get so tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
“How can I make a stranger see her as she stopped in the hall at the foot of the stairs and turned… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
“...now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
“I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
“What is cowardice in the young is wisdom in the old, but all the same one can be ashamed of wisdom.” — Graham Greene Copy Share
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a… — Graham Greene Copy Share
“Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their… — Graham Greene Copy Share
With Your great schemes, You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though… — Graham Greene Copy Share
“He had thought that home was something one possessed, but the things one had possessed were cursed with change; it was what one didn't… — Graham Greene Copy Share
Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved. — Graham Greene Copy Share
“He said, ‘Oh god, help her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live forever.’ This was the love he should have felt… — Graham Greene Copy Share
“A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the… — Graham Greene Copy Share
“I tossed up whether I'd see [the critic] or not: I knew too well the pompous phrases of his article, the buried significance he… — Graham Greene Copy Share
Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline. — Graham Greene Copy Share
“But we do not love people for what they do for us. Love happens to us; it isn't created.” — Graham Greene Copy Share
