Flannery OConnor Quotes (33 Quotes)






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


    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.

    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.

    When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.

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

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

    I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.


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

    The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.

    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.

    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.


    The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech.

    It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.



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

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

    The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it.

    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.

    There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however nave that may have been, it was a good deal less nave than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.

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

    The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

    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 truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

    Knowing who you are is good for one generation only.

    The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.


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