Flannery OConnor Quotes - Page 10

...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.

I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.

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

The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

The Bible was the only book he read. He didn't read it often but when he did he wore his mother's glasses. They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always obliged to stop.

No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

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.

I have almost no capacity for worship. What I have is the knowledge that it is my duty to worship and worship only what I believe to be true.” May 19, 1962

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her finger inside the cup.

I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.

There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.

She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.

One old lady who wants her head lifted wouldn't be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club.

Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.

Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are

The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.

She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel. "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." "Some fun!" Bobby Lee said. "Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life.

It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.

... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.

He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery.

When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.

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.

He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, 'I ain't got any tattoo on my back.' 'What you got on it?' the girl said. 'My shirt,' Parker said. 'Haw.' 'Haw, haw,' the girl said politely.