Patrick O'Brian
Patrick O'Brian
Patrick O'Brian, CBE, born Richard Patrick Russ, was an English novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey–Maturin series, a series of sea novels set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and centred on the friendship of English naval captain Jack Aubrey and the Irish–Catalan physician Stephen Maturin. The 20-novel series, the first of which is Master and Commander, is known for its well-researched and highly detailed portrayal of early 19th-century life, as well as its authentic and...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 December 1914
I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters.
Likings arise when one has no earthly reason for liking - the most wildly improbable marriages and uncommon friendship.
You can't be happy if you're not tolerably happy with yourself. The addition of friends adds immeasurably to life.
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.
I very much dislike being interviewed by the kind of journalist who tries to dig into your private life.
I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.
The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Compulsion is the death of friendship.
Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas.
There is a systematic flocci-nauci-nihili-pilification of all other aspects of existence that angers me.