Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir

"I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy."

"Conroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, "the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part of me."

"Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry."

"If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me."

"In sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You move, you react, you recover, you drive, and the thinking is seamless and invisible in the secret codes of your game."

"I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean."

"Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else."

"An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before."

"You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves."

"Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most."

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

"There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss."

"Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you at the breakfast table, follows you to work in the morning. You have to make accommodations and broker deals to soften the rabbit punches that loss brings to your daily life. You have to take the word "loser" and add it to your resume and walk around with it on your name tag as it hand-feeds you your own shit in dosages too large for even great beasts to swallow. The word "loser" follows you, bird-dogs you, sniffs you out of whatever fields you hide in because you have to face things clearly and you cannot turn away from what is true."

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

"Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary"