Quote

Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.

Graham Greene

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Graham Greene
Age: 86 †
Born: 1904
Born: October 2
Died: 1991
Died: April 3
Autobiographer
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Berkhamsted
Hertfordshire
Henry Graham Greene
Hard
Express
Even
Havens
Thing
Haven
Expression
Ends
Find
Everything
Eats
Self
Selfish

More quotes by Graham Greene

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One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge minor ones may be photographed.
Graham Greene
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I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.
Graham Greene
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A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced
Graham Greene
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Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd like to, because 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 on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together
Graham Greene
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He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.
Graham Greene
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The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?
Graham Greene
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...every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion.
Graham Greene
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There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.
Graham Greene
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The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.
Graham Greene
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A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.
Graham Greene
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Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.
Graham Greene
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Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.
Graham Greene
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In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.
Graham Greene
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He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.
Graham Greene
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All good novelists have bad memories.
Graham Greene
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She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.
Graham Greene
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It is the storytellers task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
Graham Greene
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There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.
Graham Greene
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O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.
Graham Greene
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It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.
Graham Greene