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All Quotes by author - Pat Conroy

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father. "

" I don't believe in happy families. "

" I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate. "

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

" I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown. "

" I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I still get weepy when I see a father being nice to his child. It so affects me. "

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

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

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

" 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.' "

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

" 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. "

" I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure. "

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

" I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.' "

" 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.' "

" Love came in wounded and frantic ways to my dismaying family. "

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