Top 275 Quotes & Sayings by Flannery O'Connor

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

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 God's business.

I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.

I do not know You, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.

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.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

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

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.

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

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

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

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

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

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.

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

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.

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

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. 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.

The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.

Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.

If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.

[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .

People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.

Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon It will keep you free - not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects around you.

One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.

I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.

There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've 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

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

Unadaptability is often a virtue.

Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

A God you understood would be less than yourself.

Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.

A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.

The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity.

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.

You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax 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.