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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

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You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?.
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I aim to be content with what I produce. It's an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.
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He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.
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There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost
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At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.
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I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the possibility of love dying.
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They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.
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If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.
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Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
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It's a good world if you don't weaken.
Graham Greene
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A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced
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If two people loved, they slept together it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.
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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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Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.
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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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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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Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps — violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on.
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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We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
Graham Greene