Quotes from Pat Conroy

I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta.

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

There are other writers who try for subtle and minimalists effects, but I don't travel in that tribe.

One does not know where love will take you.

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.

I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist.

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.'

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

My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood.

Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown.

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.

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

Criminal Minds, Miasma: "My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call."

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

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. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts

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.

Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?

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

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