Quotes About Patrick O'Brian

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.

King, Dean. Harbors and High Seas: An Atlas and Geographical Guide to the Complete Aubrey-Maturin Novels of Patrick O'Brian. New York: Owl Books, 2000.

Killick was a cross-grained bastard, who supposed that if he sprinkled his discourse with a good many sirs, the words in between did not signify:

Trollops are capital things in port, but will not do at sea.

Well, I will wear the bees, like Damon and Pythagoras – ho, a mere sixty thousand bees in the cabin don't signify, much.

But, however, I clapped a stopper over his capers.' Dr Maturin was proud of his nautical expressions: sometimes he got them right, but right or wrong he always brought them out with a slight emphasis of satisfaction, much as others might utter a particularly apt Greek or Latin quotation. 'And brought him up with a round stern,' he added.

It sounded as though you were having a battle there,' said Jack. 'No. It was only a tooth, a troublesome tooth: sure I have delivered many a child with less pains to all concerned.

Puddings, my dear sir?' cried Graham. Puddings. We trice 'em athwart the starboard gumbrils, when sailing by and large.

Well, it is somewhat clearer than the last,' said Stephen. 'Though I fancy invidious might answer better than insidious.' 'Invidious, of course. I knew there was something not quite shipshape there. Invidious. A capital word: I dare say you spell it with a V?

Oh for women at sea to obviate the eternal crosscat-harpings,' he said to himself, 'to do away with the grumlinfuttocks, and to inject a little civilization, even of an equivocal nature, even at the risk of moral deviation.

Word of all this had reached Diana, an unusually passionate, impulsive woman; she had written to him in unusually passionate, impulsive terms and his letter was designed to do away with her resentment of what she saw not as immoral conduct (she had no particular objection to immoral conduct) but as an intolerable public affront.

Injustice is a rule of the service, as you know very well; and since you have to have a good deal of undeserved abuse, you might just as well have it from your friends.

Two of his pictures had been seen at the first show in 1910, "La Fillette à la corbeille fleurie" and the modest "Clovis Sagot";

I am not in the least degree interested in women as such,' said Stephen. 'Only in persons.

What are bashed neeps? Neeps hackit with balmagowry.

Should I feel better if I were to vomit?' asked Jagiello. 'I doubt it,' said Stephen. 'It has done nothing for the Colonel.

all the others were unbeneficed clergymen: two had been ushers in schools for young gentlemen, and thought any other life preferable to that, even on shipboard;

making a film with Georges Clouzot, Le Mystère Picasso.

Oh, there you are. I was afraid you had gone off to your stoats again. The carrier has brought you an ape.' 'What sort of an ape?' asked Stephen. 'A damned ill-conditioned sort of an ape.

He derives a greater pleasure from a smaller stream of wit than any man I have ever known.

She is remarkably dry,' he said to Stephen who, preferring to die in the open, had crept up on deck

It is a wound, if you wish,' said Stephen. 'But not from our battle with the Cacafuego. Some lady of your acquaintance has been too liberal with her favours, too universally kind.

I mean to digest my buzzard in my cot. - Stephen Maturin

But injustice is a rule of the service, as you know very well; and since you have to have a good deal of undeserved abuse, you might just as well have it from your friends.