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
-
-
I’d be a conservative if I’d never met any. They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.
PAT CONROY -
The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn’t know how to ask.
PAT CONROY -
Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
PAT CONROY -
My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.
PAT CONROY -
It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.
PAT CONROY -
If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.
PAT CONROY -
I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
PAT CONROY -
I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
PAT CONROY -
The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
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 -
I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.
PAT CONROY -
Put 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 CONROY -
Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.
PAT CONROY -
Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?
PAT CONROY -
Cameras 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 CONROY -
I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.
PAT CONROY -
Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.
PAT CONROY -
I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.
PAT CONROY -
American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
PAT CONROY -
I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
PAT CONROY -
My 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 CONROY -
Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
PAT CONROY -
The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’
PAT CONROY -
There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
PAT CONROY -
One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.
PAT CONROY -
She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.
PAT CONROY