Quote

Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.

Pat Conroy

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Necessary
Reading
Form
Rewarding
Better
Exile
Writing
Novelists
Burn
Ambition
Discipline

More quotes by Pat Conroy

Image
I was born to be a point guard, but not a very good one.
Pat Conroy
Image
Carolina beach music, Dupree said, coming up on the porch. The holiest sound on earth.
Pat Conroy
Image
There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.
Pat Conroy
Image
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
Image
Families without songs are unhappy families.
Pat Conroy
Image
Rape is a crime against sleep and memory it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
Pat Conroy
Image
We wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That’s how art works. It’s never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It’s the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We’ve got to be patient enough to wait for them.
Pat Conroy
Image
She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.
Pat Conroy
Image
Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
Pat Conroy
Image
Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.
Pat Conroy
Image
Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
Pat Conroy
Image
Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.
Pat Conroy
Image
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
Image
Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
Pat Conroy
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the moon had reached its deepest silver, my sister, Savannah, though only three, cried aloud to our mother, to Luke and me, to the river and the moon, Oh, Mama, do it again! And I had my earliest memory.
Pat Conroy
Image
I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.
Pat Conroy
Image
Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
Pat Conroy
Image
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 ask.
Pat Conroy