Pat Conroy Quotes

No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fishermen goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.

I spent a lot of time making music and touring around the country and living the weird life. I was just trying to keep a job and get by. So in a lot of ways, I went through a strange version of film school. So you live through a lot of things, and put them into your work.

I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.

What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It's more 'thematically personal' - what's up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.

You can't reject anything in your life as an artist. Everything has its use.

I view life as a learning experience. It is not so much all about music; it is about what happens when you are doing the music.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

My films are always a reflection of where I am in my life.

As an actor, you need to grow and experience things. What you experience in life is what is going to help you and your art.

I think anything that affects me in my personal life is going to help me be a better artist on stage.

I needed time to stand back and go through a lot more experience in life. Then I have something to write about, joke or to animate.

Art and life go together. I have to have a life filled with experiences to make art, and I have to have art around me to live well.

Few of us write great novels; all of us live them.

I think that there is no doubt that every experience you have in your life, whether it's playing a character or something else, you bring that to the work.

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.

The twisted circumstances under which we live is grist for the writing mill, the loving, hating and discovering, finding new handles for old pitchers . . .

Yes, all my songs come from personal experience and relationships.

I don't want real life necessarily to be seen only as a context to heighten the deepness my work.

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so must be willing to accept all the experiences life has to offer. In fact, he must seek out more of life than life puts at his feet.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.