Wonderful factoid from page 158 of Pico Iyer's recent book on Greene -- in the course of writing a medium length novel, Greene came within 125 words of his initial estimate, in the typewriter era.

... Greene was such a master of his craft that, on beginning A Burnt-out Case, for example, he estimated that it would be 65,000 words long (220 pages, in a typical typeface); when he concluded, much, much later, it would come to 64,875 (or 219 and a half pages).

I got so curious that I tracked down the following passage from one of the volumes in Norman Sherry's biography of Greene: