Pat Conroy Quotes

"Without music, life is a journey through a desert."

"A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal."

"The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself."

"I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood."

"I'm not the lovable, wonderful, tenderhearted grandfather that you read about in books. I'm grouchy and curmudgeonly, and I have a lot of rules."

"I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara."

"Writing has never been that simple for me."

"I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole."

"To Southerners like my mother, 'Gone With the Wind' was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance."

"Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges."

"I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure."

"When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year."

"I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival."

"My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood."

"I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee."

"I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell."

"I never read my reviews... not even the good ones. Barbra Streisand once told me, if just one person in the audience doesn't applaud, it bothers her. I'm the same way. I'd be devastated to read that someone didn't like my work."

"I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate."

"I don't believe in happy families."

"Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling."

"There are other writers who try for subtle and minimalists effects, but I don't travel in that tribe."

"I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown."

"I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'"

"It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever."

"The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina."

"I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist."

"I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character."

"I'm fascinated by the people I grew up with and the mistakes I made - and God, I have screwed up. I like writing about where it all went off course."

"I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange."

"There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people."