Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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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 only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.
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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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There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.
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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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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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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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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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The reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.
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The meaning of the story is the story.
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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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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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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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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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It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.
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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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So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.
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In yourself right now is all the place you've got.
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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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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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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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The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.
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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.