The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.
PAT CONROYThe English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.
PAT CONROYThe great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.
PAT CONROYRape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
PAT CONROYSouth Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
PAT CONROYBut even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
PAT CONROYHere is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
PAT CONROYThe Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It’s a crowning achievement of his own storied career.
PAT CONROYCameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.
PAT CONROYMy mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.
PAT CONROYGood writing … involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.
PAT CONROYWriting is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
PAT CONROYThe pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
PAT CONROYYou do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.
PAT CONROYDo you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man.
PAT CONROYPut me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst.
PAT CONROYLosing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and the tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time.
PAT CONROY