Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 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
I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one… — 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
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 must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean… — 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
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
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
“I don’t believe in classes where students criticize each other’s manuscripts. Such criticism is generally composed in equal parts of ignorance, flattery,… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't… — 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
The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have… — 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
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
... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life. — 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
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
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
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 writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live. — 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
“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
