Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

• The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
• There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
• To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
• 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.
• When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.
• Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.
• The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
• I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
• The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
• 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.
• 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. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
• Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
• I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
• I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.
• I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
• It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.
• The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.
• The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.