I must be like the princess who felt the pea through seven mattresses; each book is a pea.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

A whim, a passing mood, readily induces the novelist to move hearth and home elsewhere. He can always plead work as an excuse to get him out of the clutches of bothersome hosts.

I formed a resolution to never write a word I did not want to write; to think only of my own tastes and ideals, without a thought of those of editors or publishers.

I'd rather be in trouble for having done something than for not having done anything.

I thank God daily for the good fortune of my birth, for I am certain I would have made a miserable peasant.

Clairvoyant, Hornblower could foresee that in a year's time, the world would hardy remember the incident. In twenty years, it would be entirely forgotten. Yet those headless corpses up there in Muzillac; those shattered redcoats; those Frenchmen caught in the four-pounder's blast of canister -- they were as dead as if it had been a day in which history had been changed.