Flannery O'Connor Quotes
-
The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are.
-
Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
-
I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.
-
I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened.
-
You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.
-
Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.
-
Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.
-
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.
-
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.
-
In my travels I am often asked if college stifles young writers. In my opinion, it doesn't stifle them enough.
-
If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.
-
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.
-
When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.
-
A God you understood would be less than yourself.
-
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.