Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.
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Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.
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Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.
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The life you save may very well be your own.
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When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
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There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.
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The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees.
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Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
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To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.
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There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
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I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.
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I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.
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I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.
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I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.
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There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.
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You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.
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It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.
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I spend three hours a day writing and the rest of my day getting over it.
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The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.
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The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
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Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.
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... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.
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I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.
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I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.