"Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened"
About this Quote
Ambition is the original young-man illness, and Durrell skewers it with a single, well-aimed pin. "I set out to be a genius" carries the swagger of early adulthood: not just wanting to write, but wanting to be canonized while you’re still alive to enjoy it. Then comes the twist: "mercifully laughter intervened". The adverb is doing heavy lifting. Laughter isn’t framed as mockery or defeat; it’s salvation, a corrective that keeps ego from hardening into tyranny.
Durrell’s intent is quietly brutal: the hunger to be exceptional can deform the work itself, turning art into a résumé for immortality. Laughter interrupts that solemnity. It punctures the self-important narrative of the young male artist as a destined prodigy, and replaces it with something more supple: play, humility, the capacity to see yourself from the outside. The subtext is that real writing begins when you stop auditioning for greatness and start attending to life, including your own ridiculousness.
In context, Durrell is a modernist-adjacent novelist whose career moved through expatriate mythologies and high literary aspiration. He understood the seductions of grand self-mythmaking because he lived near it. The line reads like a self-portrait touched up with comic honesty: not an apology for ambition, but an argument for levity as a discipline. Genius, he implies, might be less a crown you seize than a byproduct you stumble into once you’ve learned to laugh at the person who wanted the crown.
Durrell’s intent is quietly brutal: the hunger to be exceptional can deform the work itself, turning art into a résumé for immortality. Laughter interrupts that solemnity. It punctures the self-important narrative of the young male artist as a destined prodigy, and replaces it with something more supple: play, humility, the capacity to see yourself from the outside. The subtext is that real writing begins when you stop auditioning for greatness and start attending to life, including your own ridiculousness.
In context, Durrell is a modernist-adjacent novelist whose career moved through expatriate mythologies and high literary aspiration. He understood the seductions of grand self-mythmaking because he lived near it. The line reads like a self-portrait touched up with comic honesty: not an apology for ambition, but an argument for levity as a discipline. Genius, he implies, might be less a crown you seize than a byproduct you stumble into once you’ve learned to laugh at the person who wanted the crown.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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