Pat Conroy Life Quotations

My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.

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.

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.

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

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

I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

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.

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.

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

Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.

All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless.