English - Novelist | December 12, 1914 - January 2, 2000
The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.
Patrick O'Brian
ExplorationHumanFunctionNovel
You can't be happy if you're not tolerably happy with yourself. The addition of friends adds immeasurably to life.
LifeYourselfHappyBe HappyFriends
Likings arise when one has no earthly reason for liking - the most wildly improbable marriages and uncommon friendship.
FriendshipReasonUncommonLiking
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.
ThoughtMoreNeverTwoYearsUp
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.
GirlWifeSchoolMoreSheLittle
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.
MindUnderstandingSituationInfinite
I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.
MyselfHandNeverWriteAudience
I very much dislike being interviewed by the kind of journalist who tries to dig into your private life.
LifeKindPrivate LifeDislikeBeing
I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.
NeverHimSeeOutClearlySeduce
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.
LifeThinkKnowWayPrivate Life
I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters.
FamilyReadingLettersYearsMemoirs
In a day when, if you insulted a man it might cost you your life, you were probably more civil.
LifeDayManYouMoreCost
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