Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. — 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
“Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I spend three hours a day writing and the rest of my day getting over it. — 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
Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at… — 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
“What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.” — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
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 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
“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
“[W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. — 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
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
... Simone Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it more than most. Also she's the… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
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 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
