“Too much philosophy makes men mad.”

Brings [O’Brian’s] achievement to a new height.

Sublime Philosophy! Thou art the patriarch’s ladder, reaching heaven; And bright with beckoning angels but alas!.

I hear better with a pen in my hand.

Such is O’Brian’s power to possess the imagination that I found I was living in his world as much as my own, wanting to know what happens next.

That is the real test. Any contemporary novelist should recognize in Patrick O’Brian a Master of the Art.

I don’t have a girlfriend. I just know a girl who would get really mad if she heard me say that.

Excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.

Mothers are all slightly insane.

Does it seem that everything is extravagance in the world, or rather madness, when you watch the way things go? A crowd of rogues enjoy blessings they have won by sheer injustice, while more honest folks are miserable and die of hunger.

I’m very emotional. I think I may go mad in several years’ time.

Adversity has the effect of drawing out strength and qualities of a man that would have laid dormant in its absence.

But it wasn’t just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair.

Great talent has always a little madness mixed up with it.