Pat Conroy's Quotes

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

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

Pat Conroy

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Pat Conroy

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

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

Pat Conroy

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