Flannery O'Connor Quotes

To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks.
Flannery O'Connor
Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.
Flannery O'Connor
The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.
Flannery O'Connor
I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway less burdened.
Flannery O'Connor
I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
Flannery O'Connor
To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
Flannery O'Connor
If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time you'll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.
Flannery O'Connor
To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
Flannery O'Connor
If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time you'll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.
Flannery O'Connor
Conviction without experiences makes for harshness.
Flannery O'Connor
It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.
Flannery O'Connor
And if the student finds that this is not to his taste well that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted it is being formed.
Flannery O'Connor
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.
Flannery O'Connor
Remember what you won't get if you don't mind," her grandfather remarked.
Flannery O'Connor
If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.
Flannery O'Connor
...free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.
Flannery O'Connor
He had a look of composed dissatisfaction, as if he understood life thoroughly.
Flannery O'Connor
He had a winning smile and it was evident that he didn't think he was any better than anybody else even though he was.
Flannery O'Connor
From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don’t look for what is hidden. It is a sign of maturity not to be scandalized and to try to find explanations in charity.
Flannery O'Connor
I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing.
Flannery O'Connor
Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka.
Flannery O'Connor
In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel's worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story. In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.
Flannery O'Connor
He felt he knew now what time would be like without seasons and what heat would be like without light and what man would be like without salvation. He didn't care if he never made the train and if it had not been for what suddenly caught his attention, like a cry out of the gathering dusk, he might have forgotten there was a station to go to.
Flannery O'Connor
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 get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.
Flannery O'Connor
Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.
Flannery O'Connor
It makes a great difference to the look of a novel whether its author believes that the world came late into being and continues to come by a creative act of God, or whether he believes that the world and ourselves are the product of a cosmic accident. It makes a great difference to his novel whether he believes that we are created in God's image, or whether he believes we create God in our own. It makes a great difference whether he believes that our wills are free, or bound like those of the other animals.
Flannery O'Connor
For nearly two centuries the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of man. Many modern novelists have been more concerned with the processes of consciousness than with the objective world outside the mind. In twentieth-century fiction it increasingly happens that a meaningless, absurd world impinges upon the sacred consciousness of author or character; author and character seldom now go out to explore and penetrate a world in which the sacred is reflected.
Flannery O'Connor
You can't just say NO," he said. "You got to do NO. You got to show it. You got to show you mean it by doing it. You got to show you're not going to do one thing by doing another. You got to make an end of it. One way or another.
Flannery O'Connor
You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.
Flannery O'Connor
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
For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.
Flannery O'Connor
There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful—the myth of the "lonely writer," the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him. This is a common cliché, a hangover probably from the romantic period and the idea of the artist as a Sufferer and a Rebel.Probably any of the arts that are not performed in a chorus-line are going to come in for a certain amount of romanticizing, but it seems to me particularly bad to do this to writers and especially fiction writers, because fiction writers engage in the homeliest, and most concrete, and most unromanticizable of all arts. I suppose there have been enough genuinely lonely suffering novelists to make this seem a reasonable myth, but there is every reason to suppose that such cases are the result of less admirable qualities in these writers, qualities which have nothing to do with the vocation of writing itself.
Flannery O'Connor
I came from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation.
Flannery O'Connor
I am often told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but also there can be no reason to assume that the result of doing it in these times will give us the balanced picture it gave in Dante's. Dante lived in the thirteenth century, when that balance was achieved by the faith of his age. We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself.
Flannery O'Connor
If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.
Flannery O'Connor
He had measured five feet four inches of pure gamecock.
Flannery O'Connor
The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.
Flannery O'Connor
So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.
Flannery O'Connor
There won't be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy.
Flannery O'Connor
Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin.
Flannery O'Connor
That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.
Flannery O'Connor
Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him. This doesn't mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that. It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported. Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama.
Flannery O'Connor
Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.
Flannery O'Connor
It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.
Flannery O'Connor
The thing you do with a boy it is to show him all the to show. Don't hold nothing back.
Flannery O'Connor
His plate was full but his fists sat motionless like two dark quartz stones on either side of it.
Flannery O'Connor
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it
Flannery O'Connor
[W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
Flannery O'Connor
He has the mistaken notion that a concern with grace is a concern with exalted human behavior, that it is a pretentious concern. It is, however, simply a concern with the human reaction to that which, instant by instant, gives life to the soul. It is a concern with a realization that breeds charity and with the charity that breeds action. Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence.
Flannery O'Connor
In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.
Flannery O'Connor
When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.
Flannery O'Connor
Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other.
Flannery O'Connor
If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer will be interested in what we don't understand rather than in what we do. He will be interested in possibility rather than probability. He will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves—whether they know clearly what it is they act upon or not.
Flannery O'Connor
It follows from all this that there is no technique that can be discovered and applied to make it possible for one to write. If you go to a school where there are classes in writing, these classes should not be to teach you how to write, but to teach you the limits and possibilities of words and the respect due them. One thing that is always with the writer—no matter how long he has written or how good he is—is the continuing process of learning how to write. As soon as the writer "learns to write," as soon as he knows what he is going to find, and discovers a way to say what he knew all along, or worse still, a way to say nothing, he is finished. If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.
Flannery O'Connor
The Christian writer will feel that in the greatest depth of vision, moral judgment will be implicit, and that when we are invited to represent the country according to survey, what we are asked to do is to separate mystery from manners and judgment from vision, in order to produce something a little more palatable to the modern temper. We are asked to form our consciences in the light of statistics, which is to establish the relative as absolute. For many this may be a convenience, since we don't live in an age of settled belief; but it cannot be a convenience, it cannot even be possible, for the writer who is a Catholic. He will feel that any long-continued service to it will produce a soggy, formless, and sentimental literature, one that will provide a sense of spiritual purpose for those who connect the spirit with romanticism and a sense of joy for those who confuse that virtue with satisfaction. The storyteller is concerned with what is; but if what is is what can be determined by survey, then the disciples of Dr. Kinsey and Dr. Gallup are sufficient for the day thereof.
Flannery O'Connor
There is a great tendency today to want everybody to write just the way everybody else does, to see and to show the same things in the same way to the same middling audience. But the writer, in order best to use the talents he has been given, has to write at his own intellectual level. For him to do anything else is to bury his talents. This doesn't mean that, within his limitations, he shouldn't try to reach as many people as possible, but it does mean that he must not lower his standards to do so.
Flannery O'Connor
The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.
Flannery O'Connor
The fact is that if the writer's attention is on producing a work of art, a work that is good in itself, he is going to take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to this central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses. They call attention to themselves and distract from the work as a whole.
Flannery O'Connor
I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don't have it, you might as well forget it.But I have found that people who don't have it are frequently the ones hell-bent on writing stories. I'm sure anyway that they are the ones who write the books and the magazine articles on how-to-write-short-stories. I have a friend who is taking a correspondence course in this subject, and she has passed a few of the chapter headings on to me—such as, "The Story Formula for Writers," "How to Create Characters," "Let's Plot!" This form of corruption is costing her twenty-seven dollars.
Flannery O'Connor
The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.
Flannery O'Connor