A Quote by Flannery O'Connor
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.
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When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.... 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.
I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.
Sinclair Lewis was asked one time to give a talk to class of students about writing. When he got there he asked the class, Do you people want to be writers?and they all said yes. Then Lewis said, Why the hell aren't you at home writing?
I've had battles with writers who live in L.A. and were writing southern characters, because they felt like if they wrote 'Sugar' and 'Honey' at the end of every sentence, that would make it southern.
I don't know why 'Midsomer Murders' is so popular; I've asked this many times and I've asked the Germans particularly because I've become very fond of them, to be honest. And they say it's the irony, the sense of humour and so on.
A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.
When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?' Obviously there are differences between men and women - that's what makes it all fun. But we're all people. There's a lot of good writers who are very humanist, but still manage to kind of skip fifty-five per cent of the race. And I just don't get that. Not to be able to write an entire gender? To me, the question isn't how do you do it? It's how can you possibly avoid doing it?
Whenever young writers ask me for advice, I always say you have to be able to take a lot of rejection because, unless you're very lucky, that's what's going to happen.
I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too.
On the one hand I'm writing about somebody about whom I say in the book, "The only thing worse than being a statistic is being a statistical anomaly." So I'm writing about a particularly unlucky person. So that's a special type of hell, to be particularly unlucky.
Whenever black women have a point, they're characterized as angry black women, and therefore the thing they're talking about is no longer of importance because they have to deal with them being overly emotional or something. I recognize that people who respond negatively to what I have to say aren't at a place yet where they are able to learn ... And it's exactly what I'm trying to fight.
They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
A few people have tried to make me see that my writing isn't quite their thing by saying to me: 'What about realism?' To which my general response is, 'What about it?' However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, was to say something similar if asked 'What about the fantastic?'
I wonder if these editors, why they're not writers sometimes, because they know so much about writing.
I often wonder if all the writers who are alcoholics drink a lot because they aren't writing. It is not because they are writers that they are drinking, but because they are writers who are not writing.
I will say, as southern women, there is a southern way of life that inspires a lot of music. I can see why that's a common thread through music, but the best part about country is it's about real life. It's not about this glamorous Lamborghini, walking around with gold necklaces, all that stuff.
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