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" 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
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" 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. "
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" Love came in wounded and frantic ways to my dismaying family. "
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" 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. "
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" I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown. "
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" I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father. "
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" Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges. "
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" My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life. "
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" 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
" 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
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Wind
" 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
" It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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Journey
Life
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" Without music, life is a journey through a desert. "
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Life
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Music
" Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling. "
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Imagination
More
Writing
" My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood. "
Pat Conroy
Childhood
Father
Take
" A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal. "
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Story
Good
Good Meal
" Writing has never been that simple for me. "
Pat Conroy
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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Soul
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Long
" The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina. "
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Always
My Life
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" I still get weepy when I see a father being nice to his child. It so affects me. "
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Child
Being Nice
See
" I don't believe in happy families. "
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Happy
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Families
" I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara. "
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" I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist. "
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" 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. "
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" I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure. "
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" 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.' "
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Style
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" 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. "
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" I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate. "
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Long
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Hate