Quotes from Lawrence Durrell

We had not a taste in common. Our characters and predispositions were wholly different, and yet in the magical ease of this friendship we felt something promised us.

A million muffin-eating moralists were waiting, not for us, Brother Ass, but for the plucky and tedious Trollope!

Esos momentos son los que colman al escritor, no al enamorado, y perduran para siempre. Podemos evocarlos cuantas veces queramos o utilizarlos como fundamento para construir esa parte de la vida que es la tarea de escribir.

A puritan culture's conception of art is something which will endorse its morality and flatter its patriotism.

Bir kad?nla üç ÅŸey yapabilirsin; ya onu seversin ya onun için ac? çekersin ya da onu yazars?n.

The telephone is a modern symbol for communications which never take place

famous novel about us all, things began in exactly this way. I was strangely echoing his protagonist, summoned to the bedside of a dying friend (this was the difference) who had important things to reveal to him. Sylvie was there, too, in the centre of the picture as she always has been. Her madness was touchingly described. Of course in a way the characters were travesties of us; but the incidents were true enough and so was Verfeuille, the old chateau

history - the lamp which illumines national character...

he had discovered for himself the uselessness of having opinions and in consequence made a habit of usually saying the opposite of what he thought in a joking way. He was an ironist, hence he appeared often to violate good sense: hence too his equivocal air, the apparent frivolity with which he addressed himself to large subjects. This sort of serious clowning leaves footmarks in conversation of a peculiar kind. His little sayings stayed like the pawmarks of a cat in a pat of butter.

We have compromised so admirably with the question of their divinity that I should hate to see them replaced by a dictator or a Workers' Council and a firing squad." I had to protest at this preposterous view, but he was quite serious. "I assure you that this is the way the left-wing tends; its object is civil war, though it does not realize it — thanks to the cunning with which the sapless puritans like Shaw and company have presented their case.

A poem with its throat cut from ear to ear. The Daily Mirror

only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side.

First the young, like vines, climb up the dull supports of their elders who feel their fingers on them, soft and tender; then the old climb down the lovely supporting bodies of the young into their proper deaths.

Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine'.)

If you are born of the artist tribe it is a waste of time to try and function as a priest. You have to be faithful to your angle of vision, and at the same time recognise its partiality. There is a kind of perfection to be achieved in matching oneself to one's capacities at every level. This must, I imagine, do away with strivings, and with illusions too.

I meant of course the whole portentous scrimmage of sex itself, the act of penetration which could lead a man to despair for the sake of a creature with two breasts and le croissant as the picturesque Levant slang has it.

An artist does not have a personal life as we do, he hides it, forcing us to go to his books if we wish to touch the true source of his feelings. Underneath all his preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions which allow the forebrain to chatter) there is, quite simply, a man tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.

Words are the mirrors of our discontents merely; they contain all the huge unhatched eggs of the world's sorrows.

Minds dismembered by their sexual part' Balthazar had said once 'never find peace until old age and failing power as persuade them that silence and quietness are not hostile.

The real teacher is endurance.

upon its stalk perpetuates only the type of a determined response; there are so few elations and so few dismays to wrinkle between a laughing or a crying death, between a truthful or a lying breath.

But is there a friendship possible to attain which is deeper, even limitlessly deep, and yet wordless, idealess? It seems somehow necessary to find a human being to whom one can be faithful, not in the body (I leave that to the priests) but in the culprit mind?

No: Shakespear's household bills Could never be responsible, they say, For all the heartache and the 1000 ills His work is heir to, poem, sonnet, play . . . Emended readings give the real reason: The times were out of joint, the loves, the season. - The Critics

He sits all day on the terrace of the Brokers' Club watching women pass, with the restless eye of someone endlessly shuffling through an old soiled pack of cards.