A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle. — Flannery O'Connor 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
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
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
Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama . . . . Either one is serious about… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason… — 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
The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having… — 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
“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
