When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never… — Flannery O'Connor Attention Copy Share Image
Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by… — Flannery O'Connor Bible Copy Share Image
In most good stories, it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality,… — Flannery O'Connor Action Copy Share Image
Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has… — Flannery O'Connor Age Copy Share Image
“A perception is not a story, and no amount of sensitivity can make a story-writer out of you if you just plain… — Flannery O'Connor Empathy Copy Share Image
When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that… — Flannery O'Connor Comes and goes Copy Share Image
You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit… — Flannery O'Connor Attention Copy Share Image
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds the emotion as well as… — Flannery O'Connor Dark night Copy Share Image
“Listen, lady," he said in a high voice, "if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be… — Flannery O'Connor Grandmother Copy Share Image
“No,” he said. Then he drew breath and said, “You got a nice place here. It’s a nice part of the country.… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
But learned people can analyze for me why I fear hell and their implication is that there is no hell. But I… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“The novelist makes his statements by selection, and if he is any good, he selects every word for a reason, every detail… — Flannery O'Connor Books Copy Share Image
Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
There is a question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“There won't be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he… — Flannery O'Connor Attachment Copy Share Image
“Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish eating it nor… — Flannery O'Connor Character Copy Share Image
...I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“I hope you understand that it is not the tooth of the saber-toothed tiger I want, it is the tiger . I… — Flannery O'Connor Humor Copy Share Image
“no one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist. The devil is the greatest… — Flannery O'Connor Atheist Copy Share Image
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are… — Flannery O'Connor Art Copy Share Image
I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face… — Flannery O'Connor Character Copy Share Image
“The houses were squat and almost identical and each one had a square of grass in front of it like a dog… — Flannery O'Connor Home Copy Share Image
As for the blood and the head business, the blood and the head work together and what is not first in the… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when… — Flannery O'Connor Christian Copy Share Image
“He said he had only a few days ago believed in blasphemy as the way to salvation, but that you couldn't even… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory… — Flannery O'Connor Action Copy Share Image
Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than… — Flannery O'Connor Belief Copy Share Image
Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not,… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take… — Flannery O'Connor Books Copy Share Image
