Joseph Conrad Quotes

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

I want to make a movie that can grab people by the heartstrings.

Readers want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It's a meeting on the page.

When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass, and all they will remember are five pages. They don't remember the text - instead, they remember the sensations the text gives them.

The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story.

I am very lucky that I get to tell stories for a living. I love being able to grab people's attention, to keep them turning the pages, to make them stay awake all night. I want to stir the pulse, yes, but also to stir the heart. I hope 'The Woods' does that.

I still try to make the "next" book my "best" book. I want to grip and move you in unexpected ways.

What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt.

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.

What interests me very much as a writer is the ability for writing to have our lives to be occupied so vividly by others. I think that's what we long for as writers.

You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not just to depict life, or criticize it, but to actually make it alive.

A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.

If a character dies, you should feel that. If a character accomplishes something, you should feel that. That's where you try to find that balance. It's impossible to articulate, as you go through it. You just have to recognize it.

There is an extraordinary power in storytelling that stirs the imagination and makes an indelible impression on the mind.

Music is very transporting. I'll hear a song for the first time and I rarely listen to the lyrics. I picture that song playing as a soundtrack to a movie, or even just in the background of someone's life. This all sounds weird, but I have an active imagination, and music opens the floodgates of that area of my brain.

Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker … [I]t does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?

All fiction, if it's successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. Emotion is really what fiction is all about. That's not to say fiction can't be thoughtful, or present some interesting or provocative ideas to make us think. But if you want to present an intellectual argument, nonfiction is a better tool. You can drive a nail with a shoe but a hammer is a better tool for that. But fiction is about emotional resonance, about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level.

I certainly fall in love with artists. I think that's probably the aspiration of an artist, to make a listener empathize so deeply that they do fall in love with you.

I'm dedicated to bringing to life what the author is trying to portray. I try to make the producers cry and the crew laugh.

It drives me crazy when people say, "All we're trying to do is create entertainment." I feel like people go to movies for more than that.