Flannery O'Connor Quotes

212 quotes in 2429 categories

• There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
• The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.
• There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of…
• The reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.
• You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.
• I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people…
• I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel,…
• Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three…
• The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and…
• I believe the teacher's work is largely negative, that it is largely a matter of saying, "This doesn't work because ..." or "This does work…
• The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.
• I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story.…
• When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others,…
• The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have to get it…
• As for the blood and the head business, the blood and the head work together and what is not first in the blood can sometimes…
• When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call…
• You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself.
• Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it…
• 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 anything you can…
• It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

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