77 quotes
Perhaps his laughter saved them — it must be difficult to shoot a laughing man: you have to feel important to kill.
The Lawless Roads (1939)
People don't like reality, they don't like common sense, until age forces it on them.
The Ministry of Fear (1943)
There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.
The Comedians (1966)
As long as one suffers one lives.
The End of the Affair (1951)
I suppose the love of life which periodically deserts most men was returning: like sexual desire, it moves in cycles.
The Lawless Roads (1939)
We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us — Martins felt the little jab of dispensability.
The Third Man (1949)
Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.
Travels with My Aunt (1969)
Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.
Our Man in Havana (1958)
My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.
The old lady knelt, saying her 'Hail Mary'; She didn't believe — but among Catholics even the sceptical are courteous.
The Lawless Roads (1939)
Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted.
The Honorary Consul (1973)
Man is made by the places in which he lives...
Brighton Rock (1938)
The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.
The Third Man (1949)
An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' – it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.
No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life.
The Third Man (1949)
Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps — violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on.
The Lawless Roads (1939)
A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man.... It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.
The Ministry of Fear (1943)
You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.
Brighton Rock (1938)
"There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost"
Monsignor Quixote (1982)