GRAHAM GREENE

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.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

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 no harm.

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

Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.

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.

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

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.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

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.

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 human situation.

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

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

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

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.

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.

Failure too is a form of death.

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 regarded as monstrous.

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

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.

When we are not sure, we are alive.

The world doesn't make any heroes anymore.