Graham Greene

He and his wife both were famous Roman Catholic converts.

Lived openly with his mistress during the last part of his life.

His brother, Sir Hugh Carleton Greene (b. 1910), was in the 30s correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in Germany, from 1940 on head of BBCs German service, organized after 2nd world war the new broadcasting structure in the British Zone of Germany, much of eastern Europe and Malta, became 1958 head of BBC News and from 1960 to 1969 even Director General of BBC.

He allegedly declined an O.B.E. (Officer of the order of the British Empire) in 1956 but accepted the Companion of Honour in 1966 and Order of Merit in the 1984.

Was nominated for Broadways 1957 Tony Award as author of Best Play nominee "The Potting Shed."

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 131, pages 202-211. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.

He was made a Fellow of the British Film Institute in recognition of his outstanding contribution to film culture.

Father of Lucy Greene (b. 1933) and Francis Hugh Greene (b. 1936).

Brother of Alice Marion (b. 1896), William Herbert (b. 1898), Charles Raymond (b. 1901) and Hugh Carleton (1910-1987).

Son of Henry Graham Greene and Marion Raymond Greene.

Great-uncle of filmmaker Nicholas Greene, producer of Travels With My Aunt.

Was diagnosed with Manic Depression, now known as Bipolar Disorder.

He is an Oneida Indian.

Graduate of The Centre for Indigenous Theatres Native Theatre School program in 1974.

Native Canadian actor.

Awarded honorary doctor of law degree in June 2008, from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario Canada, close to the Oneida reserve where he is from.

Good friend of Michael Hogan.

(August 2007) Playing Shylock in the Merchant of Venice and Lenny in Of Mice and Men at the Stratford Festival, Stratford Ontario Canada.

Played a character named James Clearwater on the show Numb3rs in 2005 and then played Harry Clearwater in Twilight: New Moon in 2009.

For an actor, success is simply delayed failure.

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

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.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

Ο θάνατος είναι πάντα από μόνος του μια απόδειξη ειλικρίνειας.

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth--that God knows nothing.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance.

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

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 name?,disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible;,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.

I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?,Nothing in life was as ugly as death.

The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins: then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? And if she did, why should it not be granted her? the priest wondered. Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith--faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low down over the edge of the plateau: it looked as if it was within reach: and a small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity. The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle, began to eat, and the child lay quiet at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?,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.

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

But you do believe, don’t you," Rose implored him, "you think it’s true?" "Of course it’s true," the Boy said. "What else could there be?" he went scornfully on. "Why," he said, "it’s the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation," he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, "torments. " "And Heaven too," Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on. "Oh, maybe," the Boy said, "maybe.

You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.

Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge.

Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful,But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.

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

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.

I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy.

Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.

She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape––anywhere––for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.

I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.

Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

They killed him because he was too innocent to live.

Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death. . . One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.

Innocence always calls mutely or protection when we would be so much wise to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again.

One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.

It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.

It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.

When there was a choice between love of a woman and hate of a man, her mind could cherish only one emotion, for her love might be a subject for laughter, but no one ever had ever mocked her hatred.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. . . We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

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.

. . . 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.

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

My second wife - I was still young then - she left me, and I made the mistake of winning her back. It took me years to lose her again after that. She was a good woman. It is not easy to lose a good woman. If one must marry it is better to marry a bad woman.

Married people grow like each other.

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?,You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.

Fun. . . human nature. . . does no one any harm. . . Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.

Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God.

She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.

He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.

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.

In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old.

A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him.

Hate is a lack of imagination.

When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity – that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching.

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.

The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being- it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. I human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable.

Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.

As long as one suffers one lives.

Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.

Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my drinks. What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?,Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow," Aunt Augusta said, "like some people are only bearable under a sheet.

Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.

New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one.

There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double.

For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you – with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell – can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it’s not so difficult to be a saint. It’s something He can demand of any of us, leap.

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.

Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.

It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

It was nearly lunch-time before Blackie had finished and went in search of T. Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china, the dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators - and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become. ("The Destructors"),Death was far more certain than God.

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

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.

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

Opium makes you quick-witted - perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so important.

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic.

Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears.

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

He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.

Innocence is a kind of insanity,I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.

That was the worst period of all: it is my profession to imagine, to think in images: fifty times through the day, and immediately I woke during the night, a curtain would rise and the play would begin: always the same play, Sarah making love, Sarah with X, doing the same things that we had done together, Sarah kissing in her own particular way, arching herself in the act of sex and uttering that cry like pain, Sarah in abandonment. I would take pills at night to make me sleep quickly, but I never found any pills that would keep me asleep till daylight.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.

What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?,Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.

one gets so hopelessly tired of deception.

That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. 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.

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.

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.

It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.

Hatred seems to operate 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?,When we are not sure we are alive.

Communists have committed great crimes but at least they have not stood aside like an established society and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.

Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.

Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.

Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.

Failure too is a form of death.

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

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

The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

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.

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.

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

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

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

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. .