Pat Conroy Quotes - Page 7

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.

College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.

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

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

Writing has never been that simple for me.

We've pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we're all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.

It is the secret life that sustains me now, and as I reach the top of that bridge I say it in a whisper, I say it as a prayer, as regret, and as praise. I can't tell you why I do it or what it means, but each night when I drive toward my southern home and my southern life, I whisper these words: 'Lowenstein, Lowenstein.

Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks.

Isn't it a shame military doctors couldn't be as good as military sunglasses?

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

I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee.

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 only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole.

Families without songs are unhappy families.

We wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That’s how art works. It’s never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It’s the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We’ve got to be patient enough to wait for them.

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

Those wishing to be successful in the market can't ignore the boomer numbers, the wealth and spending power they have.

Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.

My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.

Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.