Happy Birthday, Graham Greene, 2 October 1904

Graham Greene: 14 Quotes On Life, Love & Writing

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.

1. 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.
2. 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
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Pain is easy to write. In pain we’re all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?
6. There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
7. One can’t love humanity. One can only love people.
8. I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.
9. A man kept his character even when he was insane.
10. One has no talent. I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.
11. 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.
12. 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. 
13. All good novelists have bad memories.

Graham Greene was an English author, playwright and literary critic. Greene suffered from bipolar disorder. After several suicide attempts as a schoolboy, he was sent to analyst, Kenneth Richmond, who encouraged him to write and introduced him to his circle of literary friends. 
Greene was one of the few authors who managed to combine serious literary acclaim with widespread popularity. His financial success enabled him to live comfortably and he associated with many famous figures including T.S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Evelyn Waugh, Alexander Korda, Ian Fleming, Noel Coward.
His novels include: The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, The Third Man, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana.
William Golding described Greene as “the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety.”