Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened. The weight of the centuries lies on children, I'm sure of it.
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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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The reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.
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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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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.
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Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.
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I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.
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Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration from without. It was the only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered it but from it he could see her with absolute clarity.
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The meaning of the story is the story.
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In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgement is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery.
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She would of been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.
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When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.
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A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.
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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.
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In yourself right now is all the place you've got.
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The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity.
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I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.
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It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.
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Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.
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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.
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So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.
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It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.
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When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.
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The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.