Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.
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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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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.
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I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.
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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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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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You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.
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The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.
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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.
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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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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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Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.
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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.
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Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama . . . . Either one is serious about salvation or one is not. And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.
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The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.
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Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.
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Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
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Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.
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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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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.