Flannery O'Connor Quotes
-
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
-
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.
-
We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.
-
...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.
-
There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.
-
Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.
-
On the subject of the feminist business, I just never think...of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I suppose I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex. Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome.
-
Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.
-
The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.
-
I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.
-
Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.
-
Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.
-
The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.
-
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
-
Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
-
I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.
-
You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.
-
So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.
-
The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.
-
Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
-
I'm a full-time believer in writing habits...You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away. Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that's all the energy I have, but I don't let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.
-
Nothing needs to happen to a writer’s life after they are 20. By then they’ve experienced more than enough to last their creative life.
-
Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.
-
The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have to get it in your blood, not in the head.