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. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Through writing, one experiences something different to what one experiences with the five senses one has because language is a different metier.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

A picture tells a thousand words. But you get a thousand pictures from someone's voice.

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

There are times my stories become - what I feel - not only accessible to hearing me on television, but they make wonderful reading.

I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

A great speech is literature.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

My job, and that's my job, is to dress the naked truth. To make it interesting, to make it viable, to make it seem like something you understand and feel and love.

I want to see children curled up with books, finding an awareness of themselves as they discover other people's thoughts. I want them to make the connection that books are people's stories, that writing is talking on paper, and I want them to write their own stories. I'd like my books to provide that connection for them.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

I don't see the world unless I see it in ink.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer.

I love writing different things.

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.

My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.

Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day.

I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.