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
Find
Everything
Eats
Self
Selfish
Hard
Express
Even
Havens
Thing
Haven
Expression
Ends

More quotes by Graham Greene

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God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.
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We forget very easily what gives us pain.
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Cruel men cry easily at the cinema.
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I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.
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Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness.
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So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.
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Sooner or later... one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.
Graham Greene
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Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.
Graham Greene
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As the end of the what is called the 'sexual life' the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.
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One can't love humanity. One can only love people.
Graham Greene
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So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.
Graham Greene
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People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.
Graham Greene
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Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.
Graham Greene
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I couldn't help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I've forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.
Graham Greene
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The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped.
Graham Greene
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Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.
Graham Greene
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One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.
Graham Greene
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If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.
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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In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
Graham Greene