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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

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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
Form
Rewarding
Better
Exile
Writing
Novelists
Burn
Ambition
Discipline
Necessary
Reading

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.
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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.
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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.
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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
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A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
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In family matters you can get over anything. That's one thing you'll learn as an adult. There's a lot you have to learn which is a lot worse than that. You'd never think of forgiving a friend for some of the things your parents did to you. But with friends it's different. Friends aren't the roll of the dice.
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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.
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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.
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I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.
Pat Conroy
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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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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
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My mother raised me to be a writer.
Pat Conroy
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We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game.
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Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.
Pat Conroy
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I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee.
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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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
Pat Conroy
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There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.
Pat Conroy