The Unquiet Englishman Quotes

“Amid fears of a European war, Mexico was old news. The bishops knew this, and so treated Greene with kindness and respect as someone who could tell their story to a distracted world.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“Greene wrote a robust public letter to Chaplin, published in the New Statesman,6 describing him as the finest of all screen artists, savaging Senator Joseph McCarthy, and upbraiding the American Catholic church, including Cardinal Spellman, for encouraging a persecution of the sort Catholics themselves had suffered in the past. Chaplin did not go back to the United States, settling instead in Switzerland, where Greene visited him. Their friendship was close, and Greene had a hand in Chaplin’s 1964 bestseller My Autobiography, both as editor of the manuscript and as a director of the Bodley Head, which published it.7”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“Greene had disclosed to a sympathetic American diplomat in Brussels that while at Oxford he had been a member of the Communist Party for a period. He then repeated the disclosure to a Time magazine reporter, and a ‘plastic curtain fell’. To enter the country he required the special permission of the Attorney General, a process taking three weeks, and his visits were limited to four weeks.1”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“Just before he left Vietnam, Greene had a skirmish with American consular officials obstructing his plans to visit California and New York in February 1952. The McCarran Act of 1950, passed over Harry Truman’s veto, attempted to keep people who had been communists or fascists out of the country.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“The nightmare that Greene came across in Phat Diem – including a mother and child dead in a ditch – is described in the opening paragraphs of this book. He was a journalist at a small but very ugly battle that the French did not want the world to know about, so with an offer of him spending a day with the navy they persuaded him to board a boat back upriver to Nam Dinh, where his escort simply abandoned him. But he had seen what he had seen.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“Greene wrote about this sortie in The Quiet American: ‘Down we went again, away from the gnarled and fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over the neglected ricefields, aimed like a bullet at one small sampan on the yellow stream. The cannon gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew apart in a shower of sparks; we didn’t even wait to see our victims struggling to survive, but climbed and made for home . . . There had been something so shocking in our sudden fortuitous choice of a prey – we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone again, adding our little quota to the world’s dead.’31”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“The praise Greene most valued, however, came not in a review: Faulkner himself wrote in a letter to his British publisher, the contents of which were soon passed on, ‘I have also read Mr Greene’s THE END OF THE AFFAIR; not one of yours, but for me one of the best, most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody’s language.’9”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“6 This”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“provided the French with money and weaponry, were hardening into a Cold War frame of mind: they saw the Viet Minh as just another kind of communist and failed to understand the degree to which they were inspired by nationalism and open to friendship with them.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“After some arm-twisting from the French, the United States, notionally opposed to colonialism, not only acquiesced in the French claim to Vietnam but transported thousands of French soldiers there by sea.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“Despite leading a ‘disordered’ life, Greene had a surprising effect on Catholics. Hovering on the edges of the church, his old friend Edith Sitwell, who converted some years later, wrote to him in 1945: ‘I said before, but I repeat it, what a great priest you would have made. But you are better as you are.’12 She felt that he understood sin and redemption in a way the clergy did not.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“The exchanges rumbled on all summer in the pages of various Catholic magazines and newspapers, after which the question of whether Scobie is a saint finally migrated to scholarly journals.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“Evelyn Waugh proposed that the conclusion of the book affirms the mystery that ‘no one knows the secrets of the human heart or the nature of God’s mercy’.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“Many rather damaged priests and laypeople came to regard Graham Greene as someone who could help them with their personal problems; he hated this reputation and wished they would seek psychiatrists.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“disease itself, & the disease, which has been going on ever since my childhood & was only temporarily alleviated by psycho-analysis, lies in a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life. Unfortunately the disease is also one’s material. Cure the disease & I doubt whether a writer would remain. I daresay that would be all to the good.’16”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“The most likely explanation of Greene’s desire to leave MI6 for a less demanding position lies in a scriptwriting contract he signed with MGM on 3 February 1944, providing him with twelve weeks of work in each of two years at the handsome rate of £250 per week.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“In February, he sailed back to England for a new assignment. He later wrote: ‘ “Those days” – I am glad to have had them; my love of Africa deepened there, in particular for what is called, the whole world over, the Coast, this world of tin roofs, of vultures clanging down, of laterite paths turning rose in the evening light.’44”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“Greene’s passion for West Africa is not reducible, however, to a flight from marital troubles or an effort to stave off depression. As we have seen, he distrusted the veneers of a comfortable life and felt that reality was only knowable under conditions of privation. His quest for absolutes required such conditions, and if Greeneland, a term he disliked, has a central place it may just be the little house in Freetown, which he came to regard as home.18”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“Greene shipped out from Liverpool on 9 December 1941 in a 5000-ton Elder Dempster cargo vessel”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“He wrote to his mother that even though the prize had gone in the past to writers he despised, it pleased him: ‘I suppose at the bottom of every human mind is the rather degraded love of success – any kind of success. One feels ashamed of one’s own pleasure.’39”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“However, once the priest has been arrested, the two sit together beside the corpse of the bank robber in a hut and speak amicably while outside there is hard rain – a scene which for the first time crystallizes the dialogue between Catholicism and communism that would be so much a part of Greene’s later work.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“Just as in San Antonio Greene distrusted the comforts of America, in Mexico he sees piety as a distraction from human reality. The once-pampered priest understands himself more as his clerical garments wear out and his shoes lose their soles so that his feet are exposed to dirt, stones, and snakes.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“Brighton Rock certainly raised his profile in the United States, as Viking put a good deal of effort into advance publicity for its new author. The New York Times declared the novel ‘as elegant a nightmare as you will find in a book this season . . . a revival of the Poe manner – modernized with streamlined abnormal psychology and lit by neon’.3 In England, the book was enough of a hit”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“America, for Greene, was the great spiritual deception – the heresy of well-being.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“The city of San Antonio itself struck Greene as pleasant but symptomatic of America, in that its depths were no different from it surfaces:”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“Graham Greene did not like Franco, but as a Catholic could hardly come out in favour of the Republicans. It is universally acknowledged that the Nationalists were guilty of more atrocities, but the Republicans had on their hands the murders of seven thousand secular priests, monks, and nuns – most of them in the first weeks of fighting.2 Greene’s sympathies were actually with the Basques, who supported the Republicans in exchange for regional autonomy, and in the late spring, at the time of the bombing of Guernica, he had an opportunity to fly into Bilbao as it prepared for a Nationalist assault.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“more earth-bound fiction and especially to shake off the ‘Catholic novelist’ tag, which first took hold with Brighton Rock; Greene would often say that he was ‘not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be a Catholic’.3 A memorable phrase, it is more accurate as a description of the second half of his career than of the first. Indeed, it seems that the middle-aged Graham Greene was trying to cover his intellectual and artistic tracks.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“work. He has encouraged and backed me up for nearly twenty years now, although we have never met. But it seems to make no difference. I consider Graham Greene not only the finest writer, but the finest and most perfect friend a man can have in this world.’16 For his part, Greene thought Narayan a worthy candidate for the Nobel Prize,17 and in 1974 wrote: ‘Since the death of Evelyn Waugh Narayan is the novelist I most admire in the English language.’18”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“Catholic theology of the time, which made much of what the Jesuit Karl Rahner called the ‘anonymous Christian’, one who might live a graced life without believing church doctrine.”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“whether identity is a matter of ‘substance’ or ‘consciousness’.55 Although he does not use the term, Greene believed in identity of substance, in there being an essential self. Greene saw Mrs Dalloway, for example, not as a novel with realized characters but as a mere ‘prose poem’.56 In his view, this was not only an intellectual difference between Woolf’s beliefs and his, but a failure of craft – her characters are defective because ontologically adrift. Of course, in pursuing such a point, Greene undermined his claim to be a novelist who happened to be a Catholic: his Catholicism was here shaping his sense of the novel. As a side note, it is worth observing that Greene did not simply dismiss Woolf – he thought highly of To the Lighthouse.57”
― Richard Greene, The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene