Quotes by Lawrence Durrell

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
– Lawrence Durrell
Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
– Lawrence Durrell
For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.
– Lawrence Durrell
I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.
– Lawrence Durrell
I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
– Lawrence Durrell
It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.
– Lawrence Durrell
It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.
– Lawrence Durrell
It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdy that you can get tenderness.
– Lawrence Durrell
It's unthinkable not to love - you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
– Lawrence Durrell
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.
– Lawrence Durrell
Music is only love looking for words.
– Lawrence Durrell
Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
– Lawrence Durrell
No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
– Lawrence Durrell
Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.
– Lawrence Durrell
Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
– Lawrence Durrell
Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
– Lawrence Durrell
The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.
– Lawrence Durrell
The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.
– Lawrence Durrell
There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.
– Lawrence Durrell
They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outward in space, but inward as well.
– Lawrence Durrell
Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
– Lawrence Durrell
Truth disappears with the telling of it.
– Lawrence Durrell
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
– Lawrence Durrell
I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.
– Lawrence Durrell
History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.
– Lawrence Durrell