"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."

People, Being, Listening, Word

9

Create Your Own Wallpaper

Standard

Customized

"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."

Exlpore more People quotes

"Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, American Author

People, Man, Respect

"The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone."

Victor Hugo, French Author

People, Kings

"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."

Samuel Johnson, English Author

People, Superiority

"There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness."

Francois de La Rochefoucauld, French Writer

People, Goodness

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."

Jane Austen, British Writer

People, Trouble, Want

"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."

Oscar Wilde, Irish Dramatist

People, Nothing

"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."

Francois de La Rochefoucauld, French Writer

People, Faults

"Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them."

William Hazlitt, English Critic

People, Pleasure, Promises

"I do give books as gifts sometimes, when people would rather have one than a new Ferrari."

Dean Koontz, American Author

People, Books, Gifts

"If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people."

Dean Koontz, American Author

People, Entertainment, Struggle, Support

Explore more quotes by Graham Greene

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

Success, Failure

"Heresy is another word for freedom of thought."

Thought, Freedom, Heresy, Word

"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."

Truth, Fiction, Reason, Trying

"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."

Truth, Being, Kindness, Lies

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

Wisdom, Age, Morality, Curiosity

"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."

Thought, Character

"Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are."

Life,

"People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery."

Men, People, Courage, Misery

"Failure too is a form of death."

Death, Failure

"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."

People, Talk