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"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."
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"Without literature, life is hell."
"The very fact that a Frenchman was prepared, after tow minutes of conversation, to be so friendly towards anyone, especially one who had come from England, made me restless."
"There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating."
"Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure.Ours is an entertainment seeking-nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one....This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype- the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax."
"Malcolm Price embodies all that is Welsh, aside from the green valleys and male voice choirs. The will to win against insurmountable odds is a penchant of the Welsh, put this with a propensity to never say 'die' and that is what makes the Welsh so durable."
"What's foreign one can't always keep quite clear of,For good things, oft, are not so near;A German can't endure the French to see or hear of,Yet drinks their wines with hearty cheer."
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?"
"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."
"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."
"Why doesn't hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn't worked."
"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."
"In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles."
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