Top 17 Quotes by Patrick O'Brian

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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