Loyalty confines you to accepted opinions: loyalty forbids you to comprehend
sympathetically your dissident fellows; but disloyalty encourages you
to roam through any human mind: it gives the novelist an extra dimension
of understanding.
I am not advocating propaganda in any cause. Propaganda is only concerned to
elicit sympathy for one side, what the propagandist regards as the good side:
he too poisons the wells. But the novelist's task is to draw his own likeness
to any human being, to the guilty as much as to the innocent... If we enlarge
the bounds of sympathy in our readers we succeed in making the work of the State
a degree more difficult. That is a genuine duty we owe society, to be a piece
of grit in the State machinery.
-- Graham Greene. "The Virtue of Disloyalty", an address given by
Greene, June 6, 1969, upon the award of the Shakespeare prize by the
University of Hamburg.