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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
Imagination
Forget
Comes
Remember
Compost
Good
Novelists
Journalism
Memories
Goes

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There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.
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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.
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Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.
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All good novelists have bad memories.
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In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.
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People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations
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Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
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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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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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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.
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Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.
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He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.
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Death was far more certain than God.
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Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.
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Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.
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I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: 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 forever.
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Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.
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We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
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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.
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A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.
Graham Greene