Flannery O'Connor Quotes

“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”

“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 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.”

“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 do not know You, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.”

“I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”

“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”

“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.”

“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”

“I write to discover what I know.”

“It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.”

“People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.”

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

“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.”

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

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”

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

“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.”

“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.”