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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
Goes
Imagination
Forget
Comes
Remember
Compost
Good
Novelists
Journalism
Memories

More quotes by Graham Greene

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Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.
Graham Greene
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You cannot love without intuition.
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.
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
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Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.
Graham Greene
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Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.
Graham Greene
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I had committed myself: without love I'd have to go through the gestures of love.
Graham Greene
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I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.
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.
Graham Greene
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I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you.
Graham Greene
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Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.
Graham Greene
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My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action -- even an opinion is a kind of action.
Graham Greene
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We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
Graham Greene
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All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.
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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It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.
Graham Greene
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There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.
Graham Greene
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They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.
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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He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.
Graham Greene