Wealth & Money Quote by Graham Greene

A novelist, Greene suggests, survives by a kind of thrifty scavenging: nothing observed, overheard, or felt is ever really “used up.” The line’s sly power is that it treats imagination not as divine lightning but as domestic budgeting. Art becomes housekeeping. That demystification is very Greene: a writer with a reporter’s eye and a Catholic’s sensitivity to moral waste, trained to notice the smallest human leftovers - a glance, a lie, a cheap joke - and store them for later.

The housewife comparison is doing double duty. On one hand, it flatters craft over inspiration: the good novelist doesn’t wait for genius, they keep a drawer of odds and ends and know how to make a meal from them. On the other, it smuggles in a faintly guilty subtext about appropriation. If everything “might perhaps serve its turn,” people stop being people and start becoming material. The phrase “serve its turn” is almost utilitarian, hinting at a writer’s cool opportunism: pain, intimacy, and even shame can be repurposed as narrative.

Context matters. Greene wrote across novels, screenplays, and plays in a century shaped by war, espionage, and propaganda - worlds where information is hoarded, traded, and weaponized. His metaphor frames the writer as a discreet accumulator, someone who saves what others discard. It’s also a quietly gendered provocation: he borrows the stereotype of the “careful housewife” to describe a profession still coded male, reminding us that discipline and economy - not swagger - are what actually build a body of work.