Quotes from Lawrence Durrell

The world is like a cucumber—today it's in your hand, tomorrow up your arse.

We live" writes Pursewarden somewhere, "lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time - not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.

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.

You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.

Art like life is an open secret.

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

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

Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.

The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.

The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.

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

Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.

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

Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.

Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might purprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough.

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

It's unthinkable not to love --you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.

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

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.