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" I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters. "
Patrick O'Brian
Memoirs
Letters
Family
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" You can't be happy if you're not tolerably happy with yourself. The addition of friends adds immeasurably to life. "
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" In a day when, if you insulted a man it might cost you your life, you were probably more civil. "
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" 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. "
Patrick O'Brian
Small
Newspaper
History
" 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. "
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" 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. "
Patrick O'Brian
Years
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" 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. "
Patrick O'Brian
Think
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" I very much dislike being interviewed by the kind of journalist who tries to dig into your private life. "
Patrick O'Brian
Kind
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Dislike
" I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly. "
Patrick O'Brian
Out
Never
Him
" 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. "
Patrick O'Brian
Nothing
Present
Say
" The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about. "
Patrick O'Brian
Human
Really
Exploration
" On a ship, everything is enclosed: the people are right on top of each other and can't get up and walk away. "
Patrick O'Brian
Away
Right
Walk
" 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. "
Patrick O'Brian
Books
Life
Think
" I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself. "
Patrick O'Brian
Write
Audience
Hand
" 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. "
Patrick O'Brian
Understanding
Infinite
Mind
" 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. "
Patrick O'Brian
Wife
She
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