Pat Conroy

Losing well was a gift, but winning well is this stuff of the authentic manhood.

I__e always felt a vague sense of guilt that I search for plunder and inspiration in every book or poem or story I pick up. Other people__ books are treasures when stories emerge in molten ingots that a writer can shape to fit his or her own talents. Magical theft has always played an important part of my own writer__ imagination.

Generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers.

Generally, writers descend from a lesser tribe, and whatever claim to beauty we have shows up on the printed page far more often than it does in our mirrors. Even as I writer these words I think of dozens off writers, both male and female, who make a mockery of this generalization. But comeliness among writers is rare enough to be noteworthy.

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

Throughout my career I__e lived in constant fear that I wouldn__ be good enough, that I__ have nothing to say, that I__ be laughed at, humiliated__nd I__ old enough to know that fear will follow me to the very last word I__l ever write. As for now, I feel the first itch of the novel I__ supposed to write__he grain of sand that irritates the soft tissues of the oyster. The beginning of the world as I don__ quite know it. But I trust I__l begin to know it soon.

Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.

I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbidden territory. I would look for that moment when I would begin to pour alone and in wonder. I would always try to seize that moment and to accept its challenge. I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing faith and a belief in astonishment. And if by accident, I could make a volcano in a single test tube, then what could I do with all the strange magnificent elements of the world with its infinity of unknowns, with the swarm of man, with civilization, with language?

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

There was a time when a new deputy tried to teach Mr. Fruit about the difference between a red and a green light, but Mr. Fruit had resisted all efforts to reorder what he had been doing perfectly well for many years. He had not only monitored the comings and goings of the town, his presence softened the ingrained evil that flourished along the invisible margins of the town__ consciousness. Any community can be judged in its humanity or corruption by how it manages to accommodate the Mr. Fruits of the world. Colleton simply adjusted itself to Mr. Fruit__ harmonies and ordinations. He did whatever he felt was needed and he did it with style. __hat__ the Southern way_ my grandmother said. __hat__ the nice way.

Help them, but don't make friends with them.

Gonzaga was the kind of place you__ not even think about loving until you__ left it for a couple of years.

The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.

I wish nights like this weren't so fragile and slippery and impossible to nail down for study in one's leisure. But the really great nights pass through you like whispers or shadows. They shimmer, but don't adhere.

My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.

The most powerful words in English are, "Tell me a story.

A woman in Charlotte approached me and said that she__ tired of the dysfunction in my novels. I told her I was sorry, but that is how the world has presented itself to me throughout my life.