Lawrence Durrell

“None of the great religions have done more than exclude, throw out a long range of prohibitions. But prohibitions create the desire…

— Lawrence Durrell

“If you think of yourself as a sleeping city for example… what? You can sit quiet and hear the processes going on,…

— Lawrence Durrell

“A good doctor, and in a special sense the psychologist, makes it quite deliberately, slightly harder for the patient to recover too…

— Lawrence Durrell

Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.

— Lawrence Durrell

Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.

— Lawrence Durrell

I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of…

— Lawrence Durrell

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

— Lawrence Durrell

The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to…

— Lawrence Durrell

Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both.

— Lawrence Durrell

I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair:…

— Lawrence Durrell

To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.

— Lawrence Durrell

A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make…

— Lawrence Durrell

They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.

— Lawrence Durrell

Comedians are the nearest to suicide.

— Lawrence Durrell

All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.

— 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

“Minds dismembered by their sexual part’ Balthazar had said once ‘never find peace until old age and failing power as persuade them…

— Lawrence Durrell

The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.

— Lawrence Durrell

“Underneath an artist's preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions that allow the forebrain to chatter) there is a…

— Lawrence Durrell

Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.

— Lawrence Durrell

“In marriage they legitimized despair; every kiss is the conquest of a repulsion.”

— Lawrence Durrell

Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.

— Lawrence Durrell

I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.

— Lawrence Durrell

“This is what is meant by possession - to be passionately at war for the qualities in one another to contend for…

— Lawrence Durrell

They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outward in…

— Lawrence Durrell