“The more I write the less substance do I see in my work, … It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself — and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep.”
Letter to Edward Garnett written in March 1899, published in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, Vol. 2, p. 177
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Joseph Conrad 127
Polish-British writer 1857–1924Related quotes
Section 1.14 <!-- p. 40 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem.
At age 87, [A Complimentary Luncheon to The Right Honourable Sir William Mulock …, The Empire Club of Canada Addresses, http://speeches.empireclub.org/60525/data, 13 February 1930]