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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Pat Conroy Quotes

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

I told my kids when they were little, ‘Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don’t understand how, or we wouldn’t do it. But we’re parents. So somehow we’re damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.’

– Pat Conroy

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

– Pat Conroy

A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

– Pat Conroy

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

– Pat Conroy

A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.

– Pat Conroy

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

– Pat Conroy

When I was 5 years old, my mother read me ‘Gone With The Wind’ at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.

– Pat Conroy

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

– 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

The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.

– Pat Conroy

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel ‘Deliverance’ was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of ‘The Great Gatsby.’

– 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

The great thing about all my siblings is we all agree we had a horrendous childhood. It’s not like it doesn’t affect us now; it affects us every day, in everything we do.

– 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 is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

– Pat Conroy

A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.

– Pat Conroy

My great fear of being attacked or trivialized by my contemporaries made me concentrate on what I was trying to do as a writer. It forced me to draw some conclusions that were my own.

– 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

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

– Pat Conroy

Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges.

– Pat Conroy

There’s always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.

– Pat Conroy

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

– Pat Conroy

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

The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

– Pat Conroy

I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.

– Pat Conroy