Lawrence Durrell
From Wikiquote
Lawrence George Durrell (27 February 1912 – 7 November 1990) is considered a British novelist, poet, dramatist and travel writer, even though it was discovered posthumously that he never actually held British citizenship. His most famous work is the Alexandria Quartet. His brother was Gerald Durrell.
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- Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
- Letter to Henry Miller, 1948
- Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.
- Letter to Henry Miller, 1948
- 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.
- Bitter Lemons (1957)
- It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.
- Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (1963)
- I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
- Interview in the Sunday Times, 1988
- Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
- Interview in the Sunday Times, 1988
- It's unthinkable not to love — you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
- Interview in The Observer, 1990
- 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.
- Interview in The Observer, 1990
[edit] The Alexandria Quartet (1957 - 1960)
[edit] Justine (1957)
- 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.
- There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.
- Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.
- A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
- A city becomes a world when one loves one of it's inhabitants.
[edit] Clea (1960)
- Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
- Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
- Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
[edit] Balthazar (1958)
- No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
