Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conradwas a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. He joined the British merchant marine in 1878, and was granted British nationality in 1886. Though he did not speak English fluently until he was in his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst...
NationalityPolish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 December 1857
CountryPoland
Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren't.
The end (goal) of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines.
A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.
Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.
Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day - and the sitting down is all.
The vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.
I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality
Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.
A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.
Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.
I am a great foe of favoritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works.