Graham Greene’s Writing Routine

"You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see—every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties."

In the late 1940s, English writer and later Simon & Schuster’s editor-in-chief, Michael Korda, was on his uncle’s yacht in the south of France when he met Graham Greene. Korda, who was only a teenager at the time, surrounded by famous people from the British motion picture industry, was a fish out of water. Greene offered him a martini, and from there, they struck up a long, lasting friendship.

Over the next few days on the yacht, Korda would observe Greene at work. Every morning, the English author would wake up at 6am and sit down in the shade of the deck and begin writing with a fountain pen in his little leather-bound notebook. Upon hitting 500 words for the day, “he’d stop, put the notebook away, screw up his fountain pen and say, ‘Right, let’s have breakfast and begin the day,’” Korda recalled. “And he did that every day seven days a week.”

Writing for The New Yorker in 1999, several years after Greene had passed away, Korda surmised that The Quiet American author’s daily writing …