Flannery O'Connor Quotes
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.
There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.
Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.
Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.
The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.
I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.
A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.
All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.
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.
Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.
I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.
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.
A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us.
If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it
The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.
I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.
The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!
At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.
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.
If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.
The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.” (August 9, 1955)
You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.
In the first place you can be so absolutely honest and so absolutely wrong at the same time that I think it is better to be a combination of cautious and polite
Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.
The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.
We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.
The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity.
The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.
In most good stories, it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.
Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.
I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.
