Groucho & Graham Greene

It's the birthday of comedian Groucho Marx, born in New York City (1890), who said, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."
It's the birthday of writer Graham Greene, (books by this author) born in Hertfordshire, England (1904), who said he was an agnostic, but he converted to Catholicism in order to marry his wife, and after publishing a series of lightweight thrillers, he began to work Catholic themes into his books. In 1938, he went to Mexico to cover the persecution of Catholics by socialist revolutionaries. He saw religious icons being destroyed and priests being assassinated, and that inspired his first great novel, The Power and the Glory (1940), about a fallen, alcoholic priest, who once fathered a child with a parishioner, but who risks his life going to from village to village to hear confessions and give baptisms. His novel The End of the Affair (1951) is about a devoutly Catholic man having an adulterous affair in the middle of the London Blitz. Greene based the novel on his own life. He should have been killed during the London Blitz when a bomb fell directly on his house, but he was visiting his mistress at the time, saved by his own infidelity.
Graham Greene realized early in his writing career that if he wrote just 500 words a day, he would have written several million words in just a few decades. So he developed a routine of writing for exactly two hours every day, and he was so strict about stopping after exactly two hours that he often stopped writing in the middle of a sentence. And at that pace, he managed to publish 26 novels, as well as numerous short stories, plays, screenplays, memoirs, and travel books. He said, "We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to."