I’ve written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world, and I still return to their mysterious effigies as I try to figure out what it all means—some kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they’ve been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort.

When you write by hand, you don't have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, "Is this necessary at this point in the book?

I’ve 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’s 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’s imagination.

Humor has always been the redemptive angel in the Conroys’s sad history. With this family, I shall never grow hungry from lack of material.

The writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and Creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor of knowing yourself.

I have always been attracted to male writers who can demonstrate their love and affection for women with ease, yet not draw attention to themselves.

My mother raised me to be a writer.

Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.

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