About Lawrence Durrell: Lawrence George Durrell is the tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet.
I love the French edition with its uncut pages. I would not want a reader too lazy to use a knife on me.
But do you want this? It's not much of a life. Don't you see? It's the first life I've had in four hundred years. With you--in the only way that matters--I'm alive again.
The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said, "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours. God made eternity. Let us escape from the despotism of time altoge...
Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
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.
Art like life is an open secret.
You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all lands...
A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
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.
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.
Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.
Love is poetry plus biology.
we who have travelled much and loved much: we who have -- I will not say suffered for we have always recognized through suffering our own self-sufficiency -- only we appreciate the complexities of tenderness, and understand how narrowly love and frie...
