Quotes from Patrick O'Brian

On a ship, everything is enclosed: the people are right on top of each other and can't get up and walk away.

You can't be happy if you're not tolerably happy with yourself. The addition of friends adds immeasurably to life.

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.

I know of few men over 50 that seem to me entirely human, virtually none who has long exercised authority.

No man born of woman has ever understood spoken Portuguese.

For a moment Jack felt the strongest inclination to snatch up his little gilt chair and beat the white-faced man down with it.

Although wealth may not bring happiness, the immediate prospect of it provides a wonderfully close imitation.

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.

I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.

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.

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.

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.

Likings arise when one has no earthly reason for liking - the most wildly improbable marriages and uncommon friendship.

I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.

The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.

In a day when, if you insulted a man it might cost you your life, you were probably more civil.

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.

I very much dislike being interviewed by the kind of journalist who tries to dig into your private life.

I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters.

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.

He sat on as the sun's rays came slowly down through the trees, lower and lower, and when the lowest reached a branch not far above him it caught a dewdrop poised upon a leaf. The drop instantly blazed crimson, and a slight movement of his head made it show all the colours of the spectrum with extraordinary purity, from a red almost too deep to be seen through all the others to the ultimate violet and back again.

Why, sir, said he, looking about him, what splendour I see: gold lace, breeches, cocked hats. Allow me to recommend a sandwich. And would you be contemplating an attack, at all? It had crossed my mind, I must admit, said Jack. Indeed, I may go so far as to say, that I am afraid a conflict is now virtually inevitable. Did you notice we have cleared for action?

But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more.

The words 'Very finely played, sir, I believe' were formed in his gullet if not in his mouth when he caught the cold and indeed inimical look and heard the whisper, 'If you really must beat the measure, sir, let me entreat you to do so in time, and not half a beat ahead.