Patrick O'Brian Quotes
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On a ship, everything is enclosed: the people are right on top of each other and can't get up and walk away.
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I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters.
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Likings arise when one has no earthly reason for liking - the most wildly improbable marriages and uncommon friendship.
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The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.
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I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.
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In my case, I write in the past because I'm not really part of the present. I have nothing valid to say about anything current, though I have something to say about what existed then.
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Take a newspaper account of Waterloo or Trafalgar, with all the small advertisements: it seems much more real than reading about it in a history book.
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A freewheeling mind can conceive a virtually infinite number of sequences, but just how that mind picks out and stores those that may perhaps be used later to deal with a given tension, a given situation, is far beyond my understanding.
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In a day when, if you insulted a man it might cost you your life, you were probably more civil.
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The first interviews I gave were entirely unpleasant. You have people trying to trip you up with impolite questions that have nothing to do with the books. It's simply vulgar curiosity, and I won't have it.
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When you're taking a fence on a horse, you don't think much; your body does all the thinking, and you're over or you're not over. It's much the same when you are doing a tricky thing with a pen. There are times when I'm writing very, very fast.
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You can't be happy if you're not tolerably happy with yourself. The addition of friends adds immeasurably to life.
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'Jack,you have debauched my sloth.'
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'My God, oh my God,' he said. 'Six hundred men.'
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Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.
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I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.
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About my books, that's all that I think the public has, in its normal way, to know. My private life is, by definition, private.
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My wife and I have spent most of our lives in France, and we are both pretty well bilingual, my wife more purely than I, since as a little girl she went to school in French Switzerland.
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'Other people's marriages are a perpetual source of amazement.'
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'And pray, what in sea language is meant by a ship?'
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'This short watch that is about to come, or rather these two short watches-why are they called dog watches? Where, heu, heu, is the canine connection?'
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HMS Surprise (1973)
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I very much dislike being interviewed by the kind of journalist who tries to dig into your private life.
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Desolation Island (1979)