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Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by a strong devotion to the Bible, which has kept our minds attached to the concrete and the living symbol.
Flannery O'Connor -
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
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When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.
Flannery O'Connor -
The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.
Flannery O'Connor -
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.
Flannery O'Connor -
A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.
Flannery O'Connor -
Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.
Flannery O'Connor -
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
Flannery O'Connor
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Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.
Flannery O'Connor -
Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.
Flannery O'Connor -
I love a lot of people, understand none of them.
Flannery O'Connor -
...I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.
Flannery O'Connor -
The only way to the truth is through blasphemy.
Flannery O'Connor -
When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.
Flannery O'Connor
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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.
Flannery O'Connor -
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.
Flannery O'Connor -
The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.
Flannery O'Connor -
Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.
Flannery O'Connor -
The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.
Flannery O'Connor -
If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.
Flannery O'Connor
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Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
Flannery O'Connor -
I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding.
Flannery O'Connor -
Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.
Flannery O'Connor -
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul
Flannery O'Connor