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.
Flannery O'ConnorMy 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.
Flannery O'ConnorI don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.
Flannery O'ConnorPurity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.
Flannery O'ConnorDoes one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.
Flannery O'Connor