Art & Creativity Quote by Lawrence Durrell

Durrell’s line lands like a shrug with a razor tucked inside it. “Energy” is the respectable noun, the one you can put on a grant application; “neurosis” is the confession smuggled in after dark. He’s refusing the romantic pose of the serene genius who simply “has stories to tell.” Novel-writing, he suggests, isn’t a healthy calling so much as a compulsive expenditure: time, attention, doubt, ego, self-loathing, and stubborn hope, all converted into pages that will still never feel finished.

The joke - “If you were really sensible, you’d do something else” - is not anti-art so much as anti-pretension. Durrell frames the novelist as someone who can’t quite choose sanity, because sanity is efficient. It pays on time. It doesn’t require you to manufacture meaning out of nothing and then argue with yourself about whether the meaning is counterfeit. “Sensible” here is a cutting synonym for well-adjusted, domesticated, socially legible. The subtext: the novel is what you do when ordinary life doesn’t fit, when you need to rebuild reality in a private workshop and then ask strangers to live in it.

Context matters: Durrell, a modernist-adjacent cosmopolitan best known for The Alexandria Quartet, wrote in an era when the novel was still tasked with being a total instrument - psychology, philosophy, eroticism, politics - all braided together. His quip punctures that ambition while admitting its cost. It’s a weary benediction to anyone who keeps writing anyway, not because it’s sensible, but because the alternative is worse: silence.