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" I don't believe in happy families. "
Pat Conroy
Happy
Believe
Families
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" Love came in wounded and frantic ways to my dismaying family. "
Pat Conroy
Love
Wounded
Ways
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Work
Audience
Good
" I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell. "
Pat Conroy
About
Relationship
Life
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Grandfather
You
Rules
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Childhood
Great
Now
" My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life. "
Pat Conroy
Life
Father
My Life
" The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina. "
Pat Conroy
Always
My Life
Life
" I still get weepy when I see a father being nice to his child. It so affects me. "
Pat Conroy
Child
Being Nice
See
" Writing has never been that simple for me. "
Pat Conroy
Simple
Writing
Been
" I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate. "
Pat Conroy
Long
Before
Hate
" Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into carefully chosen ranks. "
Pat Conroy
Away
American
Writing
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Screwed
Writing
Mistakes
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Night
Reading
Wind
" Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges. "
Pat Conroy
Opportunities
Aging
Challenges
" I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood. "
Pat Conroy
Fact
Parents
Father
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Inspired
Who
Now
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Soul
Man
Long
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Story
Art
History
" I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee. "
Pat Conroy
Like
Hand
Long
" 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.' "
Pat Conroy
Know
Parents
Me
" There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people. "
Pat Conroy
Better
Always
People
" I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.' "
Pat Conroy
Now
School
Think
" I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown. "
Pat Conroy
Unknown
About
I Love
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
My Life
Angel
World
" I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father. "
Pat Conroy
Love
Page
Think
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Book
Gone
Answer
" Without music, life is a journey through a desert. "
Pat Conroy
Life
Desert
Music
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
My Own
Own
Fear
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Too
Group
Family
" I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara. "
Pat Conroy
Her
Life
Mother