Pat Conroy

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 most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

Actually, parts of New Zealand remind me of Suffolk. There's not many flat bits, but just the atmosphere there. There's a kind of a core tranquility about it, a kind of assuredness that this is fairly close to approaching the perfect way to be.