Graham Greene
Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene OM CH, better known by his pen name Graham Greene, was an English novelist and author regarded by some as one of the great writers of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers. He was shortlisted, in 1967, for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through 67 years of writings, which included over 25 novels, he...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 October 1904
He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.
Tea at college was served on long tables with an urn at the end of each. Long baguettes of bread, three to a table, were set out with meagre portions of butter and jam; the china was coarse to withstand the schoolboy-clutch and the tea strong. At the Hôtel de Paris I was astonished at the fragility of the cups, the silver teapot, the little triangular savoury sandwiches, the éclairs stuffed with cream.
Failure too is a form of death...
A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.
Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.
There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost
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.
Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood-for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.
I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.
You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?.
A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.
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.
Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.
All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.