Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other peoples in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.

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 doesnt 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.

Thats the trouble with you preachers, he said. Youve all got too good to believe in anything, and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.

Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin.

There wont be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy.

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

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 doesnt mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.

He had measured five feet four inches of pure gamecock.

If you dont hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.

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 Dantes. 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.

I came from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation.

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.

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.

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

You cant 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 youre not going to do one thing by doing another. You got to make an end of it. One way or another.

Its always wrong of course to say that you cant do this or you cant do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.

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 Gods 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.

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.