Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.
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I write to discover what I know.
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People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.
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When I sit down to write, a monstrous reader looms up who sits down beside me and continually mutters, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.’ Some writers can ignore this presence, but I have never learned how.
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I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
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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.
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I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact, and nothing covers it like the bald statement.
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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.
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The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
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The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. . . . What he sees at all times is fallen man perverted by false philosophies. Is he to reproduce this? Or is he to change what he sees and make it, instead of what it is, what in the light of faith he thinks it ought to be . . . to ‘tidy up reality’?
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There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
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You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.
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On the subject of the feminist business, I just never think, that is never think of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non–Irksome without regard to sex. Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome.
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Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.
Flannery O'CONNOR, Collected Works, The Library of America, Nueva York, 1988.
