Lawrence Durrell

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

— 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

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

I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.

— 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

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

— 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

The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.

— Lawrence Durrell

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

— Lawrence Durrell

Music is only love looking for words.

— Lawrence Durrell

Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

— Lawrence Durrell

No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.

— 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

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

— 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

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