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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

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Pat Conroy
Age: 70 †
Born: 1945
Born: October 26
Died: 2016
Died: March 4
Author
Basketball Player
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
Patrick Conroy
Donald Patrick Conroy
Write
Leading
Light
Leaves
Writing
Program
Way
Novel
Life
Open
Interesting
Pours
Learn
Pour
Experience
Novels

More quotes by Pat Conroy

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Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.
Pat Conroy
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I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it.
Pat Conroy
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A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
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If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.
Pat Conroy
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Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.
Pat Conroy
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There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.
Pat Conroy
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Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks.
Pat Conroy
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But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.
Pat Conroy
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Good writing ... 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.
Pat Conroy
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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
Pat Conroy
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I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.
Pat Conroy
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One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.
Pat Conroy
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I can't pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.
Pat Conroy
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The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave
Pat Conroy
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I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I have to like that trend or go along with it.
Pat Conroy
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When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
Pat Conroy
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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
Pat Conroy
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If smallness was fortune, then I had come across a treasure, infinitesimal and beyond value. I felt lucky. You had to decide what was estimable and precious in your life and set out to find it. The objects you valued defined you.
Pat Conroy
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My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
Pat Conroy
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Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.
Pat Conroy