Flannery O'Connor Quotes

I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.

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.

The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery; that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.

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.

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

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.

Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.

I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from, and no Redemption because there was no Fall, and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.

In my travels I am often asked if college stifles young writers. In my opinion, it doesn't stifle them enough.

There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.

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.

When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that 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.... Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity.

A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.

But learned people can analyze for me why I fear hell and their implication is that there is no hell. But I believe in hell. Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven. No doubt because hell is a more earth-seeming thing. I can fancy the tortures of the damned but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God.

Nothing needs to happen to a writer’s life after they are 20. By then they’ve experienced more than enough to last their creative life.

A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, 'I ain't got any tattoo on my back.' 'What you got on it?' the girl said. 'My shirt,' Parker said. 'Haw.' 'Haw, haw,' the girl said politely.

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.

As for the blood and the head business, the blood and the head work together and what is not first in the blood can sometimes reach it by going first through the head and what is wrong in the blood can sometimes be tempered by the head.

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

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.

If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.

Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.

Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.

Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.

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. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

I 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.

The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.

It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.

The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.