Flannery O'Connor Quotes

172 Sourced Quotes

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.

Flannery O'Connor
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.

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

Flannery O'Connor
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Flannery O'Connor
Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

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

Flannery O'Connor
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 bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

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

Flannery O'Connor
The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it.... If you manage to use it successfully for social, religious, or other purposes, it is because you make it art first.

Flannery O'Connor
You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!

Flannery O'Connor
Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.

Flannery O'Connor
Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.

Flannery O'Connor
She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, through she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.

Flannery O'Connor
It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

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

Flannery O'Connor
Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

Flannery O'Connor
Enoch never nagged his blood to tell him a thing until it was ready.

Flannery O'Connor
Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by a strong devotion to the Bible, which has kept our minds attached to the concrete and the living symbol.

Flannery O'Connor
A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

Flannery O'Connor
Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.

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

Flannery O'Connor
I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.

Flannery O'Connor
I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing... If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.

Flannery O'Connor
I believe the teacher's work is largely negative, that it is largely a matter of saying, "This doesn't work because..." or "This does work because..." The because is very important. The teacher can help you understand the nature of your medium, and he can guide you in your reading.

Flannery O'Connor
Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

Flannery O'Connor
It was not right to believe anything you couldn't see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth.

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

Flannery O'Connor
What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

Flannery O'Connor
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.

Flannery O'Connor
I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.

Flannery O'Connor