Literary Birthday – 2 October – Graham Greene

Graham Greene was born on 2 October 1904 and died on 3 April 1991.

Graham Greene Quotes On Life, Love, and Writing

1. It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
5. 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 scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.
6. Pain is easy to write. In pain we’re all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?
7. There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
8. One can’t love humanity. One can only love people.
9. I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.
10. A man kept his character even when he was insane.
11. One has no talent. I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. All good novelists have bad memories.

Read: Graham Greene’s Writing Process

Graham Greene was an English novelist, playwright, and literary critic. He was one of the few writers to achieve both critical acclaim and widespread commercial success. Greene’s novels include he Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, and Brighton Rock. He also wrote the screenplay for The Third Man, one of his best-known works. His fiction often explored moral ambiguity, sin, guilt, faith, betrayal, and moral failure. Although many of his novels use crime, espionage, and political intrigue to drive their plots, Greene’s reputation rests largely on his skill as a storyteller. He was particularly admired for his precise selection of detail, realistic dialogue, and ability to maintain tension and pace. Greene was part of an influential literary and cultural circle that included T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Alexander Korda, Ian Fleming, and Noel Coward. His nonfiction included Collected Essays (1969), as well as two volumes of memoir: A Sort of Life (1971), which covers his life up to 1931, and its sequel, Ways of Escape (1980). Greene was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1966 and received the Order of Merit in 1986. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature on multiple occasions.

Image: FOTO:FORTEPAN / Magyar Hírek folyóirat, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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by Amanda Patterson
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