Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Takes
Depths
Firsts
Written
Invent
First
Word
Novelists
Writing
Story
Appears
Much
Lasts
Unconscious
Last
Details
Place
Depth
Stories
Paper
Novelist

More quotes by Graham Greene

Image
He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.
Graham Greene
Image
There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.
Graham Greene
Image
love had turned into love affair with a begining and an end.
Graham Greene
Image
I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.
Graham Greene
Image
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.
Graham Greene
Image
I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.
Graham Greene
Image
As long as one suffers one lives.
Graham Greene
Image
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
Image
Death was far more certain than God.
Graham Greene
Image
Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.
Graham Greene
Image
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.
Graham Greene
Image
He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.
Graham Greene
Image
In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.
Graham Greene
Image
My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.
Graham Greene
Image
There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped' growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.
Graham Greene
Image
I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.
Graham Greene
Image
Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness.
Graham Greene
Image
He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.
Graham Greene
Image
All good novelists have bad memories.
Graham Greene
Image
I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.
Graham Greene