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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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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
Remember
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Depths
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Written
Invent
First
Word
Novelists
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Novelist

More quotes by Graham Greene

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Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.
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You cannot love without intuition.
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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.
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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.
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Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.
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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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He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.
Graham Greene
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God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.
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Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.
Graham Greene
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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.
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Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politick. Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.
Graham Greene
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One can't love humanity. One can only love people.
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For a good man fame is always a problem.
Graham Greene
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A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced
Graham Greene
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I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?
Graham Greene
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The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Graham Greene
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Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.
Graham Greene
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Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.
Graham Greene
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They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.
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