Lawrence Durrell

Novelist, Author

1912 – 1990

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Who was Lawrence Durrell?

Lawrence George Durrell was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer, though he resisted affiliation with Britain and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan. It has been posthumously suggested that Durrell never had British citizenship, though more accurately, he became defined as a non-patrial in 1968, due to the amendment to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962. Hence, he was denied the right to enter or settle in Britain under new laws and had to apply for a visa for each entry. His most famous work is the tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet.

Famous Quotes:

  • 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.
  • Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
  • Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
  • A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
  • No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
  • Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
  • It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdy that you can get tenderness.
  • Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.
  • 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.

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Born
Feb 27, 1912
Jalandhar
Siblings
Nationality
  • United Kingdom
Profession
Education
  • St Olave's Grammar School
  • St Edmund's School
Lived in
  • Jalandhar
Died
Nov 7, 1990
Sommières

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

Citation

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