Wit & Attitude Quote by Bernard Cornwell

Regret gets put on trial here, then acquitted on a technicality: risk. Cornwell stacks four self-indictments in a row - "irresponsible, mad, forlorn, idiotic" - like charges read aloud by a prosecutor who’s also the defendant. The piling-on matters. It signals adult clarity, not self-pity: he’s refusing the cheap hero edit where past choices become inevitable steps toward success. Instead, he grants the past its chaos, its bad odds, its loneliness.

Then comes the pivot, and it’s pure storyteller craft. "But" doesn’t cancel the reckoning; it reframes it. The gambling metaphor - "take chances", "winning hand" - is deliberately coarse and pragmatic. Life as cards, not destiny. That move strips away moral ornamentation and replaces it with a working rule: outcomes require exposure. You can criticize the play, but you can’t deny the logic of the game.

The subtext is about authorship in the broadest sense: choosing to act when the future won’t provide guarantees. For a novelist, especially one whose career depends on long bets (years of writing before any payoff), the line reads as a defense of the leap that precedes competence. It also disarms readers who might romanticize risk. Cornwell labels it "idiotic" first, making the later "no regrets" feel earned rather than smug. The real intent isn’t to glorify recklessness; it’s to argue that a life judged only by prudence is a life that never even got dealt in.