Best 17 quotes of C. S. Forester on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

Novel writing wrecks homes.

Perhaps that suspicion of fraud enhances the flavor.

The fools ran after me and I ran after the whores, foolish though I realized such a proceeding to be.

The lucky man is he who knows how much to leave to chance.

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.

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.

Bush put both arms round Hornblower’s shoulders and walked with dragging feet. It did not matter that his feet dragged and his legs would not function while he had this support; Hornblower was the best man in the world and Bush could announce it by singing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ while lurching along the alleyway.

The cork was in the bottle. He and the Atropos were trapped.

Yet if he had been asked… if he were happy… He would have admitted readily enough that he was uncomfortable, that he was cold, and badly fed, and venomous; that his clothes were in rags, and his feet and knees and elbows raw and bleeding through much walking and crawling; that he was in ever-present peril of life, and that he really did not expect to survive the adventure he was about to thrust himself into voluntarily, but all this had nothing to do with happiness: that was something he never stopped to think about.