You 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 CONROYOne of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves.
PAT CONROY -
Do 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 CONROY -
Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
PAT CONROY -
Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
PAT CONROY -
Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
PAT CONROY -
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
PAT CONROY -
There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
PAT CONROY -
Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.
PAT CONROY -
You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.
PAT CONROY -
You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY -
A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
PAT CONROY -
One does not know where love will take you.
PAT CONROY -
Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.
PAT CONROY -
Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
PAT CONROY