Pat Conroy

I still get weepy when I see a father being nice to his child. It so affects me.

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.

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.

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.

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 mark the reading of 'Look Homeward, Angel' as one of the pivotal events of my life. It starts off with the single greatest, knock-your-socks-off first page I have ever come across in my careful reading of world literature.

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.

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

I'm fascinated by the people I grew up with and the mistakes I made - and God, I have screwed up. I like writing about where it all went off course.

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 would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist.

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

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.

It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

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

I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown.

I don't believe in happy families.

I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

Writing has never been that simple for me.