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All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

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
Good
Novelists
Journalism
Memories
Goes
Imagination
Forget
Comes
Remember
Compost

More quotes by Graham Greene

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So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.
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No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.
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We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
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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.
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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.
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If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?
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There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped' growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.
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As long as one suffers one lives.
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Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.
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So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.
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Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.
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People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations
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love had turned into love affair with a begining and an end.
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.
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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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Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?
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For a good man fame is always a problem.
Graham Greene
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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.
Graham Greene
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Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.
Graham Greene
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Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise on the other hand I am not deliberately melodramatic don't get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am.
Graham Greene