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" I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara. "
Pat Conroy
Her
Life
Mother
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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.' "
Pat Conroy
Now
School
Think
" 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
" Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling. "
Pat Conroy
Imagination
More
Writing
" 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
" 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 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
" 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 would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist. "
Pat Conroy
Out
College
Young
" Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges. "
Pat Conroy
Opportunities
Aging
Challenges
" 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 think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell. "
Pat Conroy
About
Relationship
Life
" I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange. "
Pat Conroy
Human Nature
Bit
Nature
" Without music, life is a journey through a desert. "
Pat Conroy
Life
Desert
Music
" My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life. "
Pat Conroy
Life
Father
My Life
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Family
People
Say
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Imagination
Girl
Wind
" 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 only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole. "
Pat Conroy
Uncle
Die
House
" A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal. "
Pat Conroy
Story
Good
Good Meal
" 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
" Love came in wounded and frantic ways to my dismaying family. "
Pat Conroy
Love
Wounded
Ways
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Tried
Rome
Music
" It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever. "
Pat Conroy
Inside
Faith
Will
" 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
" I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown. "
Pat Conroy
Unknown
About
I Love
" 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.' "
Pat Conroy
Style
Perfection
Great
" 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
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Journey
Life
Great
" 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
" I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee. "
Pat Conroy
Like
Hand
Long