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

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

Pat Conroy

Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.

Pat Conroy

An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.

Pat Conroy

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

Pat Conroy

Conroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, "the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part of me.

Pat Conroy

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

Pat Conroy

Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you at the breakfast table, follows you to work in the mo...

Pat Conroy

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

Pat Conroy

Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.

Pat Conroy

Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.

Pat Conroy

In sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You move, you react, you recover, you drive, and the thinking is se...

Pat Conroy

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn't know how to as...

Pat Conroy

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

Pat Conroy

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

Pat Conroy

I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy.

Pat Conroy

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was Wi...

Pat Conroy

Before I met the Jesuits, I’d never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics.

Pat Conroy

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

Pat Conroy

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

Pat Conroy

There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art.

Pat Conroy

The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.

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