Zitat des Tages von Pat Conroy:
Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges.
I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.
My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.
My great fear of being attacked or trivialized by my contemporaries made me concentrate on what I was trying to do as a writer. It forced me to draw some conclusions that were my own.
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.
A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee.
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.
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.
The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
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.
I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown.
There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.
My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood.
I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.
Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into carefully chosen ranks.
I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character.
I don't believe in happy families.
Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'
I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell.
I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'
