Sir,’ said Stephen, ‘I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them--I look upon good novels--as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater breadth and depth and fewer constraints.
My wife and I have spent most of our lives in France, and we are both pretty well bilingual, my wife more purely than I, since as a little girl she went to school in French Switzerland.
On a ship, everything is enclosed: the people are right on top of each other and can't get up and walk away.
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.
Likings arise when one has no earthly reason for liking - the most wildly improbable marriages and uncommon friendship.
In a day when, if you insulted a man it might cost you your life, you were probably more civil.
I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters.
I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.
