Carmen Sisson

“Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

“I met a doctor the other night who told me he had always wanted to be a writer. I nodded. People always tell me that...Then I thought to myself, 'You know, I've never met a writer who wanted to be anything else. They might bitch about something they're writing or about their poverty, but they never say they want to quit...and if they do abandon it they become crazy, drunk or suicidal.' Writing is elemental.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

“The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends ~ probably for much the same reasons that they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of themselves in their work. Moreover, literary ambition has a way of turning into literary competition; if fame is the spur, envy may be a concomitant.”
― Matthew Joseph Bruccoli