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Patrick O'Brian [1914-2000] English
Rank: 103
Novelist


Patrick O'Brian, CBE, born Richard Patrick Russ, was an English novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey–Maturin series of sea novels set in the Royal Navy, during the Napoleonic Wars, and centred on the friendship of the English naval captain Jack Aubrey and the Irish–Catalan physician Stephen Maturin.

Family, Friendship



QuoteTagsRank
I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters. Family
101
On a ship, everything is enclosed: the people are right on top of each other and can't get up and walk away.
102
Likings arise when one has no earthly reason for liking - the most wildly improbable marriages and uncommon friendship. Friendship
103
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.
104
In a day when, if you insulted a man it might cost you your life, you were probably more civil.
105
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.
106
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.
107
I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.
108
I very much dislike being interviewed by the kind of journalist who tries to dig into your private life.
109
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.
110
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.
111
You can't be happy if you're not tolerably happy with yourself. The addition of friends adds immeasurably to life.
112
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.
113
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.
114
The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.
115
I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.
116
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.
117

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