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I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened.
Flannery O'Connor -
... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.
Flannery O'Connor
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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.
Flannery O'Connor -
So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.
Flannery O'Connor -
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.
Flannery O'Connor -
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.
Flannery O'Connor -
St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.
Flannery O'Connor -
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.
Flannery O'Connor
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It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them - in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries.
Flannery O'Connor -
If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you'll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.
Flannery O'Connor -
We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.
Flannery O'Connor -
Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.
Flannery O'Connor -
She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.
Flannery O'Connor -
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.
Flannery O'Connor
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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.
Flannery O'Connor -
You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.
Flannery O'Connor -
Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.
Flannery O'Connor -
One old lady who wants her head lifted wouldn't be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club.
Flannery O'Connor -
Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.
Flannery O'Connor -
Once the process [of conversion] is begun and continues...you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity...you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to turn away from it. I measure God by everything I am not. I begin with that.
Flannery O'Connor
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It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.
Flannery O'Connor -
I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.
Flannery O'Connor -
I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.
Flannery O'Connor -
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.
Flannery O'Connor