Quote

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
Learn
Pour
Experience
Novels
Write
Leading
Light
Leaves
Writing
Program
Way
Novel
Life
Open
Interesting
Pours

More quotes by Pat Conroy

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It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me.
Pat Conroy
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American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
Pat Conroy
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Families without songs are unhappy families.
Pat Conroy
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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
Pat Conroy
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I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.
Pat Conroy
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She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.
Pat Conroy
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When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.
Pat Conroy
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I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.
Pat Conroy
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Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance.
Pat Conroy
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Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.
Pat Conroy
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It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.
Pat Conroy
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Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy.
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 had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.
Pat Conroy
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Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
Pat Conroy
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We've pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we're all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.
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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The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.
Pat Conroy
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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.
Pat Conroy
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Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?
Pat Conroy