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

(Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), British author. Sunday Times (London, Nov. 20, 1988).)

It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.

(Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), British author. Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (1963).)

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

(Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), British author. Justine, pt. 3 (1957).)

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

(Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), British author. Justine, in Clea, pt. 1, ch. 4 (1960).)

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.

(Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), British author. Justine, in Clea, ch. 1, sct. 3 (1960).)

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

(Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), British author. Pursewarden, in Balthazar, pt. 2, ch. 6 (1958). Writing to Lawrence.)

Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.

(Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), British author. Letter, December 1948, to Henry Miller. The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-80 (1988).)

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

(Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), British author. Sunday Times (London, Nov. 20, 1988).)

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

(Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), British author. The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-1980 (1988). Letter, March 1948, to Henry Miller.)

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

(Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), British author. Interview in Observer (London, November 11, 1990).)