Pat Conroy Quotes
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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.
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I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange.
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A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.
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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.
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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.
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Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.
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I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara.
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Writing has never been that simple for me.
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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.
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Love came in wounded and frantic ways to my dismaying family.
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I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell.
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I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.
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I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate.
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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.
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I have never had to look up a definition of honor. I knew instinctively what it was. It is something I had the day I was born, and I never had to question where it came from or by what right it was mine. If I was stripped of my honor, I would choose death as certainly and unemotionally as I clean my shoes in the morning. Honor is the presence of God in man.
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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.
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I still get weepy when I see a father being nice to his child. It so affects me.
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It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.
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Nancy Mace has written a wonderful, timeless memoir of the great test to become the first female graduate of The Citadel. Her book is provocative, hilarious, illuminating, and true. It is also a love letter to her college and the best book about The Citadel ever written.
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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.
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I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.
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I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'
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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.
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My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.