LAWRENCE DURRELL

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

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

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

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

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.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

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

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

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

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

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

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

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

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.

Music is only love looking for words.

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

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

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.

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