Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

“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, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over Gods business.”

“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”

“It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.”

“Everywhere I go Im asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they dont stifle enough of them.”

“I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, Im afraid it will not be controversial.”

“When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville”

“Theres many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.”

“It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.”

“Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.”

“There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may have been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.”

“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness”

“I dont deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”

“Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”

“All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.”

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”

“I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.”

“Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.”

“The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we dont have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, weve got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech.”