Bernard Cornwell
Bernard Cornwell
Bernard Cornwell, OBEis an English author of historical novels and a history of the Waterloo Campaign. He is best known for his novels about Napoleonic Wars rifleman Richard Sharpe. Cornwell has written historical novels primarily of English history in five series and one series of contemporary thriller novels. A feature of his historical novels is an end note on how the novel matches or differs from history, for the re-telling, and what you might see at the modern site of...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth23 February 1944
book writing thinking
Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you're writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one.
love-is men thinking
Love is a dangerous thing. It comes in disguise to change our life... Lust is the deceiver. Lust wrenches our lives until nothing matters except the one we think we love, and under that deceptive spell we kill for them, give all for them, and then, when we have what we have wanted, we discover that it is all an illusion and nothing is there. Lust is a voyage to nowhere, to an empty land, but some men just love such voyages and never care about the destination. Love is a voyage too, a voyage with no destination except death, but a voyage of bliss.
writing thinking careers
At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.
book thinking firsts
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the first book had not sold... doesn't bear thinking about, but I suppose we'd have made it work somehow.
book thinking vacation
Book tours and research provide a lot of travel - too much, I sometimes think, but we do take vacations.
boring breaks british-novelist early etc full start work
I start early - usually by 5 am, and work through to 5 pm, with breaks for lunch, boring exercise, etc etc. But it's usually a full day.
british hear lived states though voices
And though I've lived in the States for over 25 years and am now an American citizen, I still hear British voices in my head.
beautiful slow sounds spend time
We have a gaff-rigged topsail cutter, which sounds much grander than she really is, but she's exquisitely beautiful and shamefully slow and we spend a lot of time aboard when we can.
british-novelist crack endless entirely french novels surprising tales though
I still have to crack the French market, though that isn't entirely surprising considering that the Sharpe novels are endless tales of French defeat.
books cut happen instead three whether year
I'd like to cut it down to three books in two years instead of two a year - but whether that'll happen I don't know.
british-novelist folks mainly mind places walk
Mind you, even in places where I'm much better known, I walk in anonymity, mainly because folks know authors' names, but not their faces.
blessing commercial deny depend enjoy enormous fool fools-and-foolishness success
I'm a success inasmuch that I enjoy my life, which is an enormous blessing and that doesn't depend on commercial success (though I wouldn't be such a fool as to deny that it helps).
biggest british-novelist disagree editor helpful london
I have a terrific, marvellous, unbelievably helpful editor in London and she has the biggest influence, but even so we disagree as much as we agree.
afterwards anonymity blessed britain british channel faded few folk history memory series tv wanting weeks
I did a TV series for the British History Channel a few years ago and for a few weeks afterwards I was accosted by folk in Britain wanting to talk, which was flattering, but the memory faded and blessed anonymity returned.