Pat Conroy Quotes
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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
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I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure.
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I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges.
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The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
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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.
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There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.
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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.'
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There are other writers who try for subtle and minimalists effects, but I don't travel in that tribe.
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I don't believe in happy families.
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I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole.
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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.
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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.
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A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
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I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown.
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My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood.
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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.'
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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.
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I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee.
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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.
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Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into carefully chosen ranks.