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 CONROYThen, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
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Faulkner didn’t know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it’s necessary
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I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies.
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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
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When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.
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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.
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A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
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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.
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I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.
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I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
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The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’
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I can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.
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Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
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One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
PAT CONROY