Writer Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

I write to discover what I know.

— Flannery O'Connor

I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.

— Flannery O'Connor

Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.

— 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

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

— Flannery O'Connor

the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.

— Flannery O'Connor

Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

“You can choose what you write but you can't choose what you make live.”

— Flannery O'Connor

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— 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

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through…

— Flannery O'Connor

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

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by…

— Flannery O'Connor

I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I…

— Flannery O'Connor

Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more…

— Flannery O'Connor

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

Poorly written novels--no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters--are not good in themselves and are therefore not really…

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be…

— Flannery O'Connor

I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to…

— Flannery O'Connor

“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

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

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

There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You…

— Flannery O'Connor

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

“The serious writer has always taken the flaw in human nature for his starting point, usually the flaw in an otherwise admirable…

— Flannery O'Connor

“Wise Blood was written by an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. That belief in Christ is to…

— Flannery O'Connor

I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.

— 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 spend three hours a day writing and the rest of my day getting over it.

— Flannery O'Connor

I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

— Flannery O'Connor

“For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.”

— Flannery O'Connor

“What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.”

— Flannery O'Connor

I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.

— Flannery O'Connor

... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.

— Flannery O'Connor

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

— Flannery O'Connor

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