Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.
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When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.
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[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .
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But learned people can analyze for me why I fear hell and their implication is that there is no hell. But I believe in hell. Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven. No doubt because hell is a more earth-seeming thing. I can fancy the tortures of the damned but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God.
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Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.
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Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.
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Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.
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Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.
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Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.
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That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.
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I do not know You, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.
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It is a sign of maturity... to find explanations in charity.
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I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.
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The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.
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I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
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The dead don't bother with particulars.
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Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
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I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.
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Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.
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I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
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Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
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I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.
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It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
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I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.