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.
Graham Greene

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.
Graham Greene

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.
Graham Greene

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.
Graham Greene

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.
Graham Greene

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.
Graham Greene

Failure too is a form of death.
Graham Greene

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

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

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.
Graham Greene


Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
Graham Greene

I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.
Graham Greene

If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?
Graham Greene

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

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

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.
Graham Greene

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

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

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.
Graham Greene

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