Quotes by Pat Conroy

About Pat Conroy:

Pat Conroy is a New York Times bestselling author who has written several acclaimed novels and memoirs. Two of his novels, The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, were made into Oscar-nominated films. He is recognized as a leading figure of late-20th century Southern literature.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

You're going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It's the hardest role in the world.

Pat Conroy

It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.

Pat Conroy

I was born in the age of "alas".

Pat Conroy

The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.

Pat Conroy

Great romantics are granted lots of slack.

Pat Conroy

The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are.

Pat Conroy

He lived out his whole life as an anthem to the pleasures of a bad mood.

Pat Conroy

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

Pat Conroy

What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts

Pat Conroy

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

Pat Conroy

The most powerful words in English are, "Tell me a story.

Pat Conroy

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

Pat Conroy

The writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and Creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor of knowing yourself.

Pat Conroy

Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.

Pat Conroy

I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake.

Pat Conroy

Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited ...

Pat Conroy

Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphro...

Pat Conroy

I have built a city from the books I've read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me.

Pat Conroy

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

Pat Conroy

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

Pat Conroy

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then th...

Pat Conroy

Author Bio

  • NamePat Conroy
  • DescriptionNovelist
  • BornOctober 26, 1945
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionBaseball Player; Novelist
  • WorksThe Great Santini; The Lords Of Discipline; The Prince Of Tides
  • AwardsLillian Smith Book Award