Quotes from Pat Conroy

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave

There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous.

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

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

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.

Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.

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

I'm not the lovable, wonderful, tenderhearted grandfather that you read about in books. I'm grouchy and curmudgeonly, and I have a lot of rules.

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.

A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.

I don't know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.

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.

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

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

Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.

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

Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.

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.'

Love came in wounded and frantic ways to my dismaying family.

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.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

I've always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.

We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.

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.