... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.” — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“You can choose what you write but you can't choose what you make live.” — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it. — Flannery O'Connor 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 Copy Share Image
The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the… — Flannery O'Connor 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
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 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
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
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 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 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 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
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 Copy Share Image
“Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“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 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
When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
In my travels I am often asked if college stifles young writers. In my opinion, it doesn't stifle them enough. — 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
People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
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 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
