It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them - in which case, if you don't… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity. — 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 Copy Share Image
Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don't know why the bull and Mrs.… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you'll save yourself from… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama . . . . Either one is serious about… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Elizabeth Hardwick told me once that all her first drafts sounded as if a chicken had written them. So do mine for… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing… — Flannery O'Connor 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 Copy Share Image
I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I'm a full-time believer in writing habits...You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“Wait here, wait here!" he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
... the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“I don’t know how to cure the source-itis except to tell you that I can discover a good many possible sources myself for Wise… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.” — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless… — Flannery O'Connor 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 best stories… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“There are all kinds of truth ... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.” — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“Mrs. May winced. She thought the word Jesus should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom.” — Flannery O'Connor 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 by saying… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
