Few people understood the exceptional role the civil rights movement had on the white boys and girls of the South. Bill Clinton would never have become who he was without the shining example of Martin Luther King. The same is true of Jimmy Carter and Fritz Holling's and Richard and Joe Riley. Imagine this: you’re a little white kid, and you watch firehouses turned on people who don’t seem to be hurting anyone, and fierce dogs being tuned on young men who carry signs about freedom. We white kids grew up watching movies and TV and guess what we had learned to do? We had learned to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

— Pat Conroy

Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.

— Pat Conroy

From the beginning, I’ve told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me that I was a man of courage when I survived that merciless crucible of a four-year test that is the measure of The Citadel experience. I’m the kind of writer I am because of The Citadel.

— Pat Conroy

Generally, writers descend from a lesser tribe, and whatever claim to beauty we have shows up on the printed page far more often than it does in our mirrors. Even as I writer these words I think of dozens off writers, both male and female, who make a mockery of this generalization. But comeliness among writers is rare enough to be noteworthy.

— Pat Conroy

Generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers.

— Pat Conroy

Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.

— Pat Conroy

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

— Pat Conroy

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tight fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

— Pat Conroy

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

— Pat Conroy

Great romantics are granted lots of slack.

— Pat Conroy