Quotes from Pat Conroy

The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are.

You would think he was somebody the way he carries on. My God, he's from Spartanburg. Spartanburg of all the pitiful places. The upcountry. The goddam, no-count upcountry.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

I don't know when my parents began their war against each other – but I do know the only prisoners they took were their children.

Unlike most women I have known, she placed no value on shallow pretensions or hypocritical displays of gentility.

One noteworthy thing about South Carolina is the quality of school-bus drivers in the state. To qualify for a bus license one must have reached puberty and be able to recite the alphabet without stuttering.

I reveled in class discussion and the Socratic method of drawing substance out of calcified minds untrained to think.

My irritation with Niles was growing, though. I had always thought the quiet man was the most overrated form of human life.

Teaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are killing their spirit with unnecessary pressure and expectation that seem forced and destructive to me. Long ago I was one of them. I still regret I was forced to leave them. My entire body of work is because of men and women like them.

There was always a grandeur and a nobility in my megalomania. And also something cheap and loathsome that I could not help.

I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little.

Again, I know that story is suspect in the high precincts of American fiction, but only because it brings entertainment and pleasure, the same responses that have always driven puritanical spirits at the dinner table wild when the talk turns to sexual intercourse and incontinence.

You must appreciate beauty for it to endure.

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.

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

I consider the two years in Beaufort when I taught high school as perhaps the happiest time of my life. My attraction to melodrama and suffering had not yet overwhelmed me, but signs of it were surfacing. No one had warned me that a teacher could fall so completely in love with his students that graduation seemed like the death of a small civilization.

From the beginning, I've told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me that I was a man of courage when I survived that merciless crucible of a four-year test that is the measure of The Citadel experience. I'm the kind of writer I am because of The Citadel.

We Shall Overcome" by Pete Seeger. I remember that moment with crystal clarity and I comprehend it as a turning point in my life: a moment terrible in its illumination of a toad in my soul, an ugliness so pervasive that it seemed my insides were vomit.

Generally, writers descend from a lesser tribe, and whatever claim to beauty we have shows up on the printed page far more often than it does in our mirrors. Even as I writer these words I think of dozens off writers, both male and female, who make a mockery of this generalization. But comeliness among writers is rare enough to be noteworthy.

Without my knowledge, the mooncalf bedlam of Ireland had filled me with an incurable anxiety, an uncontrollable temper, a tendency to abuse alcohol, a stubbornness I found both repellent and incurable, and a tendency to always think I'm right. What a screwed up legacy this hard-hearted Ireland left to me.

The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It 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.

There's the neurotic mother who's so demanding that the sound of her voice over the phone can cause instant nausea in her daughters.

A breeze lifted off the ocean and several hundred notes from the wind chimes tinkled like ice shaken in silver cups. They altered the mood of the forest the way an orchestra does a theater when it begins tuning up its instruments.