Top 52 Flannery O'connor Writing Quotes
#1. I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.
Flannery O'Connor
#2. Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.
Flannery O'Connor
#3. Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.
Flannery O'Connor
#4. You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself.
Flannery O'Connor
#5. People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.
Flannery O'Connor
#6. Like Flannery O'Connor, McCorkle's genius is to give us both philosophical speculation and a riveting narrative filled with unforgettable characters. Great writing, poignancy, humor, wisdom-all are in abundance here. Jill McCorkle is one of the South's greatest writers; she is also one of America's.
Ron Rash
#7. The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.
Flannery O'Connor
#9. People without hope do not write novels ... [Writing fiction] is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won't survive the ordeal.
Flannery O'Connor
#10. 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
#11. Simone Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it more than most. Also she's the example of the religious consciousness without a religion which maybe sooner or later I will be able to write about.
Flannery O'Connor
#12. You may ask, why not simply call this literature Christian? Unfortunately, the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart. And a golden heart would be a positive interference in the writing of fiction.
Flannery O'Connor
#13. I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.
Flannery O'Connor
#14. The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.
Flannery O'Connor
#15. The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have to get it in your blood, not in the head.
Flannery O'Connor
#16. You can choose what you write but you can't choose what you make live.
Flannery O'Connor
#17. 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.
Flannery O'Connor
#18. Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.
Flannery O'Connor
#19. Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
Flannery O'Connor
#20. I don't believe in classes where students criticize each other's manuscripts. Such criticism is generally composed in equal parts of ignorance, flattery, and spite. It's the blind leading the blind, and it can be dangerous. A teacher who tries to impose a way of writing on you can be dangerous, too.
Flannery O'Connor
#21. Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.
Flannery O'Connor
#22. Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.
Flannery O'Connor
#23. If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.
Flannery O'Connor
#24. Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don't know why the bull and Mrs. May have to die, or why Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune: I just feel in my bones that that is the way it has to be. If I had the abstraction first I don't suppose I would write the story.
Flannery O'Connor
#25. When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.
Flannery O'Connor
#26. Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.
Flannery O'Connor
#27. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
Flannery O'Connor
#28. I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.
Flannery O'Connor
#29. Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.
Flannery O'Connor
#30. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
Flannery O'Connor
#31. Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.
Flannery O'Connor
#32. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.
Flannery O'Connor
#33. 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 again.
Flannery O'Connor
#34. Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.
Flannery O'Connor
#35. As for the blood and the head business, the blood and the head work together and what is not first in the blood can sometimes reach it by going first through the head and what is wrong in the blood can sometimes be tempered by the head.
Flannery O'Connor
#36. [Writing about her address to a ladies club]: The heart of my message to them was that they would all fry in Hell if they didn't quit reading trash.
Flannery O'Connor
#37. There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
Flannery O'Connor
#38. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.
Flannery O'Connor
#39. I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.
Flannery O'Connor
#40. 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.
Flannery O'Connor
#41. We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.
Flannery O'Connor
#42. I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.
Flannery O'Connor
#43. It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.
Flannery O'Connor
#45. Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things. However,
Flannery O'Connor
#46. It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing. I
Flannery O'Connor
#47. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.
Flannery O'Connor
#48. 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
#49. I love Crews, but had been writing a long time before I knew of him. I learned of him because a friend thought we were similar. The reason we are is we were both heavily influenced by Flannery O'Conner. She was wonderful.
Joe R. Lansdale
#50. Flannery revealed she had been working on the novel "a year and a half and will probably be two more years finishing it." She described her writing habits in a letter dated July 13: "I must tell you how I work. I don't have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing.
Flannery O'Connor
#51. I spend three hours a day writing and the rest of my day getting over it.
Flannery O'Connor
#52. It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.
Flannery O'Connor
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