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.

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.

Brazil is bigger than Europe wilder than Africa and weirder than Baffin Land.

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

I dont believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there but which he has not experienced.

A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper or at least not about love.

The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you...

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.

Music is only love looking for words.

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

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.

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

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

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.

We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

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

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

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

A city becomes a world when one loves one of it's inhabitants.

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.