Pat Conroy

Though Nathalie Dupree did not remember much about my presence in her class, it marked me forever. I remain her enthusiast, her evangelist, her acolyte, and her grateful student. She taught me that cooking and storytelling make the most delightful coconspirators.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

There are other writers who try for subtle and minimalists effects, but I don't travel in that tribe.

I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown.

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 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.

The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.

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

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'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 have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange.

When my novel 'Beach Music' came out in 1995, I had included a couple of recipes in the book and had tried to impart some of my love of Roman cuisine and the restaurants of Rome.

I don't believe in happy families.

To Southerners like my mother, 'Gone With the Wind' was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into carefully chosen ranks.

My great fear of being attacked or trivialized by my contemporaries made me concentrate on what I was trying to do as a writer. It forced me to draw some conclusions that were my own.

I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.

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.

I'm not the lovable, wonderful, tenderhearted grandfather that you read about in books. I'm grouchy and curmudgeonly, and I have a lot of rules.

Writing has never been that simple for me.

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