Flannery O'Connor Quotes
People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.
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.
...free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.
Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.
It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them - in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries.
She would of been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.
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.
Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.
Elizabeth Hardwick told me once that all her first drafts sounded as if a chicken had written them. So do mine for the most part.
In my travels I am often asked if college stifles young writers. In my opinion, it doesn't stifle them enough.
Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.
... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.
I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.
There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.
Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.
The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.
Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.
I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.
Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.
Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.
Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.
Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.
So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.
When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.
I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.
You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will.
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.
It was not right to believe anything you couldn't see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth.
Poorly written novels--no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters--are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.
... the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him.
When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.
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.
It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.
That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.
