Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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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.
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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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Kindness and patience were always called for.
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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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Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.
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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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Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it
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... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.
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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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When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until it pleases him to turn. When it suits him, the peacock will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing, haloed suns.
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I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.
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The only way to the truth is through blasphemy.
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It was not right to believe anything you couldn't see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth.
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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.
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There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.
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There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
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I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.
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I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.
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The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
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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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Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.
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As for the blood and the head business, the blood and the head work together and what is not first in the blood can sometimes reach it by going first through the head and what is wrong in the blood can sometimes be tempered by the head.
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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.
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Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.