Pat Conroy Quotes

It’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.

Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.

From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.

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.

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

Here’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite.

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.