I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure.
Pat ConroyThe mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
Pat ConroyHere's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.
Pat Conroy