Flannery O'Connor Quotes

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.

The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

Policy and politics generally go contrary to principle.

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgement is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery.

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.

My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her finger inside the cup.

... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.

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 have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.

It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she liver with, her only boy.

[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.

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.

A God you understood would be less than yourself.

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.

It is a sign of maturity... to find explanations in charity.

I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

I spend three hours a day writing and the rest of my day getting over it.

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.

Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too.

He knew something was going to happen and his entire system was waiting on it. He thought it was going to be one of the supreme moments in life but apart from that, he didn't have the vaguest notion what it might be. He pictured himself, after it was over, as an entirely new man, with an even better personality than he had now. He sat there for about fifteen minutes and nothing happened.

There is a question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. I believe that we are ultimately directed Godward but that this journey is often impeded by emotion

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.

The meaning of the story is the story.

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.

Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.

I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be out of it. Nobody could then 'smile darkly and ignore the howls.' Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration from without. It was the only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered it but from it he could see her with absolute clarity.

I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.

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.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.

To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.

... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.

Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

I have what passes for an education in this day and time, but I am not deceived by it.

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.

I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.

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.

I love a lot of people, understand none of them.