Graham Greene

“In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!”

“Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully...”

“Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.”

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a hum...”

“Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.”

“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.”

“The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every sc...”

“Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.”

“People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery...”

“The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.”

“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...”

“In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”

“It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.”

“Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

“Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning...”

“A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be reg...”

“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.”

“A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.”

“God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.”

“We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.”