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" 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. "

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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

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

" Without music, life is a journey through a desert. "

" 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. "

" Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling. "

Pat Conroy

Imagination

Writing

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

" My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood. "

" 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

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

" There are other writers who try for subtle and minimalists effects, but I don't travel in that tribe. "

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

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

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

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

Pat Conroy

Hand

Long

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Though Nathalie Dupree did not remember much about my presence in her class, it marked me forever. I remain her enthusiast, her evangelist, her acolyte, and her grateful student. She taught me that cooking and storytelling make the most delightful coconspirators. "

Pat Conroy

She

Remember

" 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. "

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

" 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. "