Graham Greene Biography Quotes 38 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Henry Graham Greene was born on 2 October 1904 in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England, into a large, intellectually active family. His father, Charles Henry Greene, served as headmaster of Berkhamsted School, and his mother, Marion, kept a busy household that introduced their children to books, argument, and public life. Graham grew up with several siblings, including his younger brother Hugh Greene, who would later become Director-General of the BBC. The family environment, at once close and competitive, shaped his acute sense of observation and his early awareness of authority, conformity, and rebellion, themes that would return throughout his fiction. Greene attended Berkhamsted School, where the complexities of being both pupil and the headmaster's son left an enduring mark. He went on to Balliol College, Oxford, to read history, graduating with a solid grounding in politics, religion, and the tangled histories of empires that would inform his mature work.

Beginnings in Journalism and Conversion
After Oxford, Greene learned the rhythms of deadlines and the economies of prose as a sub-editor at The Times in London. Journalism gave him a disciplined approach to craft and an eye for telling detail. In the mid-1920s he met Vivien Dayrell-Browning, whose questions about faith prompted him to explore Catholicism. Greene was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1926, and he and Vivien married the following year. Their marriage, sometimes tender and often strained by his restlessness and absences, produced two children. Catholicism became central to his inner life and to the imaginative world of his fiction, not as a simple creed but as a field of moral tension where belief and doubt contend.

First Novels and the Formation of a Voice
Greene's debut novel, The Man Within (1929), brought attention to a new writer with a taste for treachery, fear, and compromised loyalties. He followed with The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1931), books he later disowned for their derivatives of earlier influences. The real breakthrough came with Stamboul Train (1932), retitled Orient Express in the United States, a compact thriller that announced the cool lucidity and dramatic control that would become hallmarks. Throughout the 1930s he honed two modes he would later distinguish as "novels" and "entertainments", a flexible division that allowed him to move between metaphysical drama and taut suspense. England Made Me (1935), A Gun for Sale (1936), and the bitterly vivid Brighton Rock (1938) demonstrated his mastery of pacing and his fascination with sin, innocence, and the pressures of modern urban life.

Travel, Witness, and the Catholic Imagination
Greene's appetite for travel was both personal and artistic. He went to Liberia in the mid-1930s, a hazardous trek recorded in Journey Without Maps, and to Mexico on the eve of the Second World War, where anticlerical campaigns and a climate of fear and faith shaped his travel book The Lawless Roads and, more lastingly, the novel The Power and the Glory (1940). That novel, along with The Heart of the Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951), formed the core of his so-called Catholic novels, works in which guilt, mercy, grace, and betrayal are dramatized with unsparing candor. These books brought Greene a wide readership and controversy; he spoke to believers and skeptics alike, refusing easy consolations while insisting on the reality of moral choice.

War, Intelligence, and Political Worlds
During the Second World War, Greene served with British intelligence. He was posted to Sierra Leone, an experience that sharpened his view of duplicity, bureaucratic pressure, and the ambiguous ethics of espionage. In London he worked among figures who would later become notorious, including Kim Philby; the complexities of loyalty and treachery in that era resonated through his later fiction. His reporting and travels after the war took him to French Indochina, giving rise to The Quiet American (1955), a prescient account of idealism and intervention; to pre-revolutionary Cuba for Our Man in Havana (1958), a comedy of intelligence-gathering and invention; to the Congo for A Burnt-Out Case (1960); and to Haiti for The Comedians (1966), a grim portrait of life under dictatorship. Greene's fiction registered the texture of places under strain, and the human compromises demanded by fear, power, and love.

Film, Theatre, and Collaborations
Parallel to his work in fiction, Greene wrote widely for the stage and screen. He served as a film critic for The Spectator and briefly for the magazine Night and Day; a pointed review of a Shirley Temple film led to a libel action that closed the latter, a sharp lesson in the hazards of candor in print. His collaboration with director Carol Reed produced enduring classics: The Fallen Idol (1948), adapted from his story The Basement Room, and The Third Man (1949), for which Greene wrote the story and screenplay. The film's haunted postwar Vienna and Orson Welles's portrayal of Harry Lime gave visual form to Greene's world of charm, betrayal, and moral drift. Greene also adapted and revisited his own work for cinema, maintaining a rare equilibrium between literary quality and popular appeal. On stage he proved a serious playwright, authoring The Living Room (1953), The Potting Shed (1957), and The Complaisant Lover (1959), plays concerned with conscience and desire. His dramatist's instinct for scene and dialogue fed back into his prose, tightening his structures and sharpening his sense of the dramatic reveal.

Editors, Friendships, and Literary Advocacy
Greene took a keen interest in publishing and in championing other writers. As an editor and reader, he supported voices he admired, notably the Indian novelist R. K. Narayan, whose work he helped introduce to British readers. Among his literary contemporaries he maintained friendships and thoughtful rivalries; the Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh was a frequent interlocutor, and their correspondence shows a mixture of doctrinal argument and professional respect. Greene's circle extended to filmmakers, journalists, and intelligence hands; these overlapping worlds kept him close to the currents of culture and politics he chronicled with wary sympathy.

Faith, Marriage, and Private Life
Greene's marriage to Vivien Dayrell-Browning anchored the early decades of his adult life, but the couple grew apart, and they lived separately for many years. Greene remained a Catholic, but his conscience and temperament pulled him toward restlessness and doubt. His long relationship with Catherine Walston, whom he loved and to whom he dedicated The End of the Affair, left its imprint on his most intimate fiction. Later, Yvonne Cloetta became his companion for the final decades, sharing the peripatetic life he maintained chiefly between France and Switzerland. Through these relationships, Greene wrestled with the demands of fidelity and the claims of vocation; he treated the conflicts not as gossip but as material for a continuous inquiry into love, freedom, and accountability.

Later Work and Reputation
In later years Greene remained industrious, publishing The Honorary Consul (1973), The Human Factor (1978), and Monsignor Quixote (1982), books that blend spiritual inquiry with political or comic invention. He also wrote memoirs, A Sort of Life (1971) and Ways of Escape (1980), distilling experience into elegant self-portraiture without banishing ambiguity. He revisited old terrains in short fiction and essays, retaining a scrupulous prose style that prizes clarity over ornament. Although often mentioned among candidates for major international prizes, he kept a distance from public acclaim, valuing independence over ceremony.

Final Years and Legacy
Greene spent much of his later life on the Continent, increasingly drawn to quieter towns and to the companionship of Yvonne Cloetta. He died on 3 April 1991 in Vevey, Switzerland, after a period of ill health. By then he had created a body of work unique in twentieth-century letters: novels of conscience that read with the tautness of thrillers; entertainments that open onto the abyss of moral choice; plays and screen stories that fixed his preoccupations in the public imagination. Around him stood figures who sharpened his vision and widened his reach: Vivien Dayrell-Browning in the years of conversion; Catherine Walston and Yvonne Cloetta in the middle and late years; colleagues such as Carol Reed and Orson Welles who brought his stories to the screen; writers like Evelyn Waugh whose arguments energized him; and even the troubling presence of Kim Philby, emblem of a century of secrecy and betrayal. Greene's novels continue to engage readers for their lucid prose, their unsentimental compassion, and their insistence that private faith and public action cannot be separated without cost.

Our collection contains 38 quotes who is written by Graham, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Mortality.

Other people realated to Graham: John Le Carre (Author), Evelyn Waugh (Author), Phillip Noyce (Director), Christopher Hampton (Playwright), Ian Hart (Actor), Neil Jordan (Director), Bill Brandt (Photographer), Shirley Hazzard (Novelist), Michael Apted (Director), Muriel Spark (Novelist)