478 Quotes by Pat Conroy

What’s important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts.

Fantasy is one of the soul’s brighter porcelains.

Everyone was surprised and enraged by the usurpation of this inalienable Caucasian right to park one’s ass on a leather stool and drink a Coke.

I can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.

Isn’t it a shame military doctors couldn’t be as good as military sunglasses?

But let me begin with a statement of my own passionate and indignant belief – I do not care one goddamned thing about how James Dickey conducted his personal life. I care everything about what this man wrote on blank sheets of paper when he sat alone probing the extremities of imagination.

I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.

I’ve always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature’s profligate generosity.