“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 Empathy Copy Share Image
Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by… — Flannery O'Connor Bible Copy Share Image
In most good stories, it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality,… — Flannery O'Connor Action Copy Share Image
Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has… — Flannery O'Connor Age Copy Share Image
You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit… — Flannery O'Connor Attention Copy Share Image
When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that… — Flannery O'Connor Comes and goes 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
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 Ability Copy Share Image
“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is… — Flannery O'Connor Faith 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
“I have tried imagining that the single peacock I see before me is the only one I have, but then one comes… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
He knew that he was the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made and that he had turned his destiny as… — Flannery O'Connor Balance 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
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 Age Copy Share Image
Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don't know why the bull and Mrs.… — Flannery O'Connor Abstract Copy Share Image
Harcourt sent my book to Evelyn Waugh and his comment was: “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady,… — Flannery O'Connor Book Copy Share Image
If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you'll save yourself from… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“Did you see the picture of Roy Rogers's horse attending a church service in Pasadena? I forgot whether his name was Tex… — Flannery O'Connor Church service 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
The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.” (August 9, 1955) — Flannery O'Connor August 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 Books Copy Share Image
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
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 Abstraction Copy Share Image
A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“I have 50 or 60 pages on the [new] novel but I still expect to be a long time at it. It’s… — Flannery O'Connor Books Copy Share Image
The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the… — Flannery O'Connor Fiction Copy Share Image
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 Crossroads Copy Share Image
My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her… — Flannery O'Connor Approach Copy Share Image
“You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse… — Flannery O'Connor Education Copy Share Image
“The world was made for the dead. Think of all the dead there are...There's a million times more dead than living and… — Flannery O'Connor And Copy Share Image
“Do you think, Mr. Motes,” she said hoarsely, “that when you’re dead, you’re blind?” “I hope so,” he said after a minute.… — Flannery O'Connor Blind 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… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given.… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can… — Flannery O'Connor Art Copy Share Image
The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from, and no Redemption because there was no… — Flannery O'Connor Atheism Copy Share Image
At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair… — Flannery O'Connor Age 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 Behavior Copy Share Image