Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence George Durrellwas an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth27 February 1912
real achieve refinement
It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.
real men artist
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.
adversity bored laughing
They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.
moving artist paint
I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.
women animal burrowing
Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.
fall writing trying
To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.
travel real eye
Try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling, that mysterious sense of rapport, of identity with the ground. You can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle you'll be there.
land europe brazil
Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.
anxiety technique poetry-is
Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.
kissing lovers unsaid
Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds
men poet conspiring
Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.
fire mind ignite
It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind.
air squares pillars
Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.
beautiful kissing water
She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at lest understandable. I realize now the time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought, ‘She is untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly.