Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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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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You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.
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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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So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.
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I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened.
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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.
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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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If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.
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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.
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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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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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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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A God you understood would be less than yourself.
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The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.
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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.