Graham Greene Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

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  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.

  Graham Greene

  Love, Depression, Fear

  New York Times, January 8, 1981.

• Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?

  Graham Greene

  Pain, Writing, Easy

• So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

  Graham Greene

  Moving Forward, Writing, Shopping

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

• 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

  Fake People, Distance, Writing

  Graham Greene (1993). “Mornings in the dark: the Graham Greene film reader”, Carcanet Press Ltd.

• When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.

  Graham Greene

  Hate, Mistake, Believe

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

• I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.

  Graham Greene

  Writing, Play, People

  Graham Greene, Henry J. Donaghy (1992). “Conversations with Graham Greene”, p.37, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Sometimes I get so tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them. I know he is afraid of that desert which would be around him if our love were to end, but he can't realise that I feel exactly the same. What he says aloud, I say to myself silently and write it here.

  Graham Greene

  Writing, Tired, I Love Him

  "The end of the affair".

• And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.

  Graham Greene

  Lost Love, Writing, Men

  Graham Greene (1951). “The End of the Affair”, London Heinemann [1951]

• So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.

  Graham Greene

  Writing, Depends, Superficiality

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

• Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd like to, because now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together

  Graham Greene

  Home, Writing, Yesterday

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

• Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise; on the other hand I am not deliberately melodramatic; don't get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am.

  Graham Greene

  Writing, Hands, Annoyed

  Graham Greene, Henry J. Donaghy (1992). “Conversations with Graham Greene”, p.44, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• 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.

  Graham Greene

  Writing, Novelists, Literature

  Graham Greene (1994). “In Search of a Character: Two African Journals”, Penguin USA

• I aim to be content with what I produce. It's an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.

  Graham Greene

  Writing, Littles, Achieve

  Graham Greene, Marie-Françoise Allain (1991). “Conversations with Graham Greene”

• I write about situations that are common, universal might be more correct, in which my characters are involved and from which only faith can redeem them, though often the actual manner of the redemption is not immediately clear. They sin, but there is no limit to God's mercy and because this is important, there is a difference between not confessing in fact, and the complacent and the pious may not realize it.

  Graham Greene

  Character, Writing, Differences

  Graham Greene, Henry J. Donaghy (1992). “Conversations with Graham Greene”, p.38, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed-he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.

  Graham Greene

  Dog, Book, Writing

  Graham Greene (1973). “Collected Stories”

• Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?

  Graham Greene

  Writing, Doors, Taverns

  Graham Greene (1971). “Triple pursuit: a Graham Greene omnibus”, Viking Pr

• A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.

  Graham Greene

  Writing, Doe, Precaution

  Graham Greene (1982). “A Burnt-Out Case”, Viking Adult

• So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.

  Graham Greene

  Writing, Lasts, Firsts

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

• One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.

  Graham Greene

  Real, Character, Writing

  Graham Greene, Henry J. Donaghy (1992). “Conversations with Graham Greene”, p.42, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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