Quotes By C. S. Forester

Perhaps that suspicion of fraud enhances the flavor.

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

Novel writing wrecks homes.

The doctor who applied a stethoscope to my heart was not satisfied. I was told to get my papers with the clerk in the outer hall. I was medically rejected.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

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.

When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.

A man who writes for a living does not have to go anywhere in particular, and he could rarely afford to if he wanted.

The work is with me when I wake up in the morning; it is with me while I eat my breakfast in bed and run through the newspaper, while I shave and bathe and dress.

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

The material came bubbling up inside like a geyser or an oil gusher. It streamed up of its own accord, down my arm and out of my fountain pen in a torrent of six thousand words a day.

They managed to find time... to tell me that there was no chance of my being accepted for service and that really I should be surprised to still be alive.

I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this.

With two people and luggage on board she draws four inches of water. Two canoe paddles will move her along at a speed reasonable enough in moderate currents.

There is still need to think and plan, but on a different scale, and along different lines.

Everything was in stark and dreadful contrast with the trivial crises and counterfeit emotions of Hollywood, and I returned to England deeply moved and emotionally worn out.