Pat Conroy Quotes

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Pat Conroy

Profession : Writer

Birth : October 26, 1945

I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole.

Pat Conroy

I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee.

Pat Conroy

I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell.

Pat Conroy

I never read my reviews... not even the good ones. Barbra Streisand once told me, if just one person in the audience doesn't applaud, it bothers her. I'm the same way. I'd be devastated to read that someone didn't like my work.

Pat Conroy

Writing has never been that simple for me.

Pat Conroy

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

Pat Conroy

I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate.

Pat Conroy

There are other writers who try for subtle and minimalists effects, but I don't travel in that tribe.

Pat Conroy

I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown.

Pat Conroy

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'

Pat Conroy

It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

Pat Conroy

I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character.

Pat Conroy

I'm fascinated by the people I grew up with and the mistakes I made - and God, I have screwed up. I like writing about where it all went off course.

Pat Conroy

I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange.

Pat Conroy

My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.

Pat Conroy

When my novel 'Beach Music' came out in 1995, I had included a couple of recipes in the book and had tried to impart some of my love of Roman cuisine and the restaurants of Rome.

Pat Conroy

Though Nathalie Dupree did not remember much about my presence in her class, it marked me forever. I remain her enthusiast, her evangelist, her acolyte, and her grateful student. She taught me that cooking and storytelling make the most delightful coconspirators.

Pat Conroy

I mark the reading of 'Look Homeward, Angel' as one of the pivotal events of my life. It starts off with the single greatest, knock-your-socks-off first page I have ever come across in my careful reading of world literature.

Pat Conroy

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.

Pat Conroy

Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into carefully chosen ranks.

Pat Conroy