Joseph Conrad Quotes

Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.

Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

for my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated.

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

Truth is not always injured by fiction.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

Novels are longer than life.

You don't know reality until someone makes a fiction of it. Reality needs the completion of fiction.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.

You don't have to have a true story to make a true story movie.

A novel is both a story and a piece of writing. A movie is a story and a piece of filmmaking.

I feel that entertainment happens when fact and fiction is balanced.

The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.

Wondrous strong are the spells of fiction.

I think both you and I, we live in a world of fiction and stories.

I always figure there are novels and short stories, and in those, I'm God. No one tells me what to do. I don't have to lose a page, or cut anything, it's just mine. Then there are other things where you're up against realities.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.