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"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."
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"We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started."

"I believe that in every country the people themselves are more peaceably and liberally inclined than their governments."

"A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths."

"People generally quarrel because they cannot argue."

"How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?"

"I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one."

"I am confident that, in the end, common sense and justice will prevail. I'm an optimist, brought up on the belief that if you wait to the end of the story, you get to see the good people live happily ever after."
Explore more quotes by Graham Greene

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

"He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?"

"He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch."

"He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death."

"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."

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

"Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing."
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