Lawrence Durrell Biography Quotes 25 Report mistakes

Early Life
Lawrence Durrell was born in 1912 in Jalandhar, in British India, to British parents. His father, a civil engineer, worked on railways, and the family moved within the subcontinent during his childhood. Sent to England as a teenager for schooling, Durrell never warmed to the regimen of British public schools and resisted the conventional educational path. He read omnivorously, taught himself languages and music, and gravitated toward poetry and the arts. In his early twenties he began publishing poems and a first novel while supporting himself through odd jobs and literary journalism in London.

Corfu and the Making of a Writer
In the mid-1930s Durrell moved with his first wife, Nancy Myers, to the Greek island of Corfu, where his mother and siblings, including his brother Gerald Durrell, later joined them. The Corfu years were formative: the island's light, landscapes, and polyglot society became central to his imagination. He wrote intensively, developing the lyrical prose and sensuous evocation of place that would become trademarks. Friendships with writers and travelers passing through the Ionian, and correspondence with the American novelist Henry Miller and the diarist Anais Nin, helped sharpen his cosmopolitan outlook. Out of this period came the material for Prospero's Cell, the reflective travel book that distilled his Corfu experience into a poetic geography of memory, myth, and observation.

War and Diplomatic Service
The Second World War scattered the Corfu circle. Durrell worked for British information and diplomatic services around the Mediterranean and Near East, notably in Cairo and later on Rhodes and in Belgrade. The postings immersed him in embassies, consulates, and newsrooms where rumor, politics, and personality collided, worlds he later recast in comic diplomatic tales and in darker, more intricate fiction. On Rhodes he wrote Reflections on a Marine Venus, a meditation on art, antiquity, and recovery after war. In the 1950s he served on Cyprus during the island's violent struggle over its future, an experience he transformed into Bitter Lemons, a nonfiction portrait of community and conflict that won the Duff Cooper Prize.

The Alexandria Quartet
Durrell achieved international fame with The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea. Set in Alexandria on the eve of war, the four interlinked novels revisit the same knot of love affairs and political intrigues from multiple angles, dramatizing how perspective alters truth. The books mingle street-level Alexandria, cafes, harbors, brothels, with salons of diplomats and exiles, a world Durrell knew well from his time in Egypt. The Quartet's narrative experiment, lush style, and psychological intensity made it a touchstone of mid-century English-language fiction and cemented his reputation as a writer of place and atmosphere as much as plot.

Later Works and Life in France
Durrell remained restlessly productive. He wrote poetry, plays, essays, and the comic Antrobus stories about diplomatic life. Tunc and Nunquam probed modernity and technology through satire and romance. In later years he embarked on the ambitious Avignon Quintet, Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian, and Quinx, set largely in southern France and Central Europe. These novels, shifting between history and metafiction, layered wartime memory with philosophical speculation, doubling characters and narratives to examine the instability of self and story. From the early 1960s onward he lived mainly in the Languedoc, in the town of Sommieres, whose medieval streets and flood-prone river he celebrated in essays and letters. The house there became a salon of sorts for painters, writers, and old friends passing through.

Personal Life
Durrell's personal life was as intricate as his fiction. He married several times, first to Nancy Myers during the Corfu period. Later he married Eve (Yvette) Cohen, with whom he had a daughter, Sappho; he also had a daughter, Penelope, from an earlier marriage. He shared years with the Frenchwoman Claude-Marie Vincendon, whose companionship in France steadied him during periods of intense work and travel. His siblings remained important figures; Gerald Durrell, who became a celebrated naturalist and writer, often served as both foil and ally in family memoirs. Friendships with Henry Miller and Anais Nin formed a crucial dialog that ran across decades of letters, testing and affirming his ideas about art, eros, and literary freedom. The strains of constant movement, public controversy over his service on Cyprus, and family tragedies, especially Sappho's death, left marks on his later life and work.

Style, Themes, and Reputation
Durrell's prose is highly wrought, musical, and sensuous, attentive to light, color, and the textures of cities. He treated the Mediterranean as a theater of civilizations where East and West, ancient and modern, intersect. Central to his fiction is the relativity of knowledge: the belief that truth appears differently depending on the observer's position in space, time, and desire. He blended travel writing with metaphysical inquiry, erotic confession with political intrigue, and comic anecdote with lyric meditation. Admirers praised the audacity and beauty of his writing; detractors found it mannered or self-dramatizing. Yet even critics conceded his unmatched gift for conjuring place and mood, and for orchestrating multiple viewpoints into a polyphonic whole.

Final Years and Legacy
In his final decades Durrell continued to write, revise, and correspond from Sommieres, receiving visitors and returning intermittently to Greece and Cyprus. He remained linked to a generation of mid-century cosmopolitans, diplomats, artists, and refugees, whose lives had crossed borders as readily as genres. He died in 1990 in France. By then, his bookshelf spanned poetry, novels, travelogues, and letters, a body of work that mapped an imaginative Mediterranean commonwealth. His influence can be traced in later writers of place-rich, structurally daring fiction, and his name endures through The Alexandria Quartet and the enduring companionship of his travel books with readers who seek cities and islands remade in language.

Our collection contains 25 quotes who is written by Lawrence, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Music.