I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta.

Pat Conroy

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Pat Conroy

A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.

Pat Conroy

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

Pat Conroy

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.

Pat Conroy

I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange.

Pat Conroy

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'

Pat Conroy

I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.'

Pat Conroy

I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara.

Pat Conroy

A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.

Pat Conroy

I don't believe in happy families.

Pat Conroy

My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.

Pat Conroy

Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges.

Pat Conroy

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

There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.

Pat Conroy

When my novel 'Beach Music' came out in 1995, I had included a couple of recipes in the book and had tried to impart some of my love of Roman cuisine and the restaurants of Rome.

Pat Conroy

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

Pat Conroy

I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole.

Pat Conroy

The great thing about all my siblings is we all agree we had a horrendous childhood. It's not like it doesn't affect us now; it affects us every day, in everything we do.

Pat Conroy

I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee.

Pat Conroy

Though Nathalie Dupree did not remember much about my presence in her class, it marked me forever. I remain her enthusiast, her evangelist, her acolyte, and her grateful student. She taught me that cooking and storytelling make the most delightful coconspirators.

Pat Conroy