Life's Pleasures Quote by C. S. Forester

Obsession rarely announces itself as obsession. Forester stages it as routine: breakfast in bed, the newspaper, shaving, bathing, dressing. The domestic checklist reads almost cozy, then tightens into something claustrophobic because the same presence shadows every act: the work. By repeating “it is with me,” he turns creativity into a roommate you can’t evict, a companion that doesn’t care about your hygiene or your appetite. The line’s power comes from how calmly it admits what many writers prefer to mythologize as “inspiration”: the job colonizes the day before the day even begins.

Forester wasn’t a salon aesthete; he was a professional storyteller who built page-turners with the discipline of a tradesman. That matters. This isn’t romantic suffering in a garret. It’s the working writer’s reality in the first half of the 20th century, when producing novels was as much about stamina and craft as about genius. The intimacy of the details (breakfast in bed, the morning paper) suggests a middle-class stability, and within that stability the work becomes the true center of gravity, quietly displacing leisure, even identity. You’re not a person who writes; you’re a person being written through.

There’s also a sly admission of anxiety. If the work follows you into the bathroom, it’s not only dedication; it’s surveillance. The mind keeps drafting, revising, problem-solving. Forester makes that sound matter-of-fact, which is the sharpest confession: the cost has been normalized.