I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.

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.

Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please" This also became Conrad's epitaph.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.