Pat Conroy Quotes

I don't believe in happy families.

I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure.

We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game.

She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.

Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.

Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

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

One does not know where love will take you.

(You) don't leave the chicken to watch the feed.

Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.

My mother raised me to be a writer.

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.

Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance.

Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.

I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it.

Writing has never been that simple for me.

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

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

Families without songs are unhappy families.

My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.

The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.

Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life.

I envy the tireless intimacy of women’s friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength.

It's politics . . . It makes everybody stupid. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean.

There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art.

I felt the sharp sting of emptiness and solitude that you feel so acutely and with such internal sorrow and wonder whenever music is performed well.

I don’t know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.

I cannot express how lordly and transfigured I felt at that moment. I was a prince of that harbor, a porpoise king - slim among the buoys and the water traffic.

Moonrise is a fabulous novel and my damn wife wrote it and that’s me up there near Highlands shouting it out to the hills.

It eases my soul that I share a house with [Cassandra King] a novelist of such rare and distinctive gifts.

Carolina beach music, " Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.

My father managed to change his entire life after I wrote a novel about his brutal regime as a family man. It took resoluteness and courage for my father to change, and I need to acknowledge that.

It’s the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much.

He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart.

Great romantics are granted lots of slack.

I have always been attracted to male writers who can demonstrate their love and affection for women with ease, yet not draw attention to themselves.

You have to pay for this view (onto which he looks while writing), so our expenses keep us pretty motivated to write. It's a vicious cycle.

Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.

I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.

I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.

Read the great books, gentlemen, ” Mr. Monte said one day. “Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There’s not enough time.

A woman in Charlotte approached me and said that she’s tired of the dysfunction in my novels. I told her I was sorry, but that is how the world has presented itself to me throughout my life.

The most powerful words in English are, "Tell me a story.

Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.

Help them, but don't make friends with them.