Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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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.
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I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened.
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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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You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.
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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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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.
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There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
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The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development.
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Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
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If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.
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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.
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The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.
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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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Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are.
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Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.
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A God you understood would be less than yourself.
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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.
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Nothing needs to happen to a writer’s life after they are 20. By then they’ve experienced more than enough to last their creative life.
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Dear God, I don't want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don't want to have created God to my own image as they're so fond of saying. Please give me the necessary grace, oh Lord, and please don't let it be as hard to get as Kafka made it.
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A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.
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The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.
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On the subject of the feminist business, I just never think...of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I suppose I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex. Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome.
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One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.
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I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.