Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
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Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.
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You don't serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I'll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God. We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it.
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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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You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.
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...free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.
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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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I believe the teacher's work is largely negative, that it is largely a matter of saying, "This doesn't work because ..." or "This does work because ..." The because is very important. The teacher can help you understand the nature of your medium, and he can guide you in your reading.
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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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If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.
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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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I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.
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Policy and politics generally go contrary to principle.
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We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.
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Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don't know why the bull and Mrs. May have to die, or why Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune: I just feel in my bones that that is the way it has to be. If I had the abstraction first I don't suppose I would write the story.
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Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.
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Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.
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I am a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist, but like someone else would be an atheist.
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There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.
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There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech.
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Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.
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The Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. 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.
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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.
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The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which is both natural and supernatural--understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.