You can't be happy if you're not tolerably happy with yourself. The addition of friends adds immeasurably to life.
From Patrick O'Brian
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.
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.
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.
I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.
I very much dislike being interviewed by the kind of journalist who tries to dig into your private life.
I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.
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.
I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters.
In a day when, if you insulted a man it might cost you your life, you were probably more civil.
2 perspectives
1 perspectives