Graham Greene

"A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious."

"A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life."

"I had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home."

"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."

"I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time."

"It's easier to get over a thing" Scobie said, "if you talk about it"

"For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation"

"the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature"

"So much of a novelist’s writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them."

"If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions: he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it."

"For a moment he came near to sharing their incredible belief—it would do no harm to mutter a prayer of thanks to the God of his childhood, the God of the Common and the castle, that no ill had yet come to Sarah's child. Then a sonic boom scattered the words of the hymn and shook the old glass of the west window and rattled the crusader's helmet which hung on a pillar, and he was reminded again of the grown-up world. He went quickly out and bought the Sunday papers. The Sunday Express had a headline on the front page—"Child's Body Found in Wood."

"Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?"

"... and for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship - pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish we were to be afraid of loneliness."

"I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain."

"I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different"

"Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space."

"He was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he caused others."

"Heresy is another word for freedom of thought."

"It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval."

"She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs."