Quotes from Pat Conroy

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

I still get weepy when I see a father being nice to his child. It so affects me.

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

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

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

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.

Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.

... the wing of a fly is proof enough of the existence of God for me.

Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers

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

I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

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

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

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'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.

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.

All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless.

Some things don't mix. Some things don't mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.

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.

To Southerners like my mother, 'Gone With the Wind' was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance.

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.

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.