Pat Conroy Quotes

If I'm gonna tell a real story, I'm gonna start with my name.

The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'

In my new book, 'Binge,' I share essays about everything I've never told my viewers - touching on the best and worst days of my life, some hilarious, some embarrassing, but all extremely personal.

All confessions are Odysseys.

I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

I'm not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I'd rather be figured out.

Surely the whole point of writing your own life story is to be as honest as you possibly can, revealing everything about yourself that is most private and probably most interesting for that very reason.

I write to be truthful in my songs, which is why I wrote what's painfully truthful about my life in my autobiography.

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

I write about personal experiences.

I don't think you're ever ready to read your life back to yourself and try to make it entertaining for others.

I really tell a lot of stories. I want people to know who I am.

I don't think I necessarily am prepared to write about anybody else's life but mine.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

For in this walk, this voyage, it is yourself, the profound history of your 'self,' that now as always you encounter.

My writing is authentic, and whatever happens in my life is what I write about.

'M Train' is as close to knowing what I'm like as anything. I don't know exactly what the book is about. All and nothing, I suppose.

To me, having the courage to tell your own story goes hand in hand with having the curiosity and humility to listen to others' stories.

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

I feel like I really tapped into a pretty honest emotional place for myself as a lyricist. There's a broad spectrum of emotions.

I have all these revelations as I'm writing. Each song is like a chapter of my diary.

Everything I write is about me.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.