A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
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

Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.
Lawrence Durrell

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.
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

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

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

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
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

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
Lawrence Durrell

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
Lawrence Durrell

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.
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