Famous Quotes by Flannery O’Connor

  • The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence. More
  • Even the ones who report favorably don’t seem to have read the book. More
  • I think they are the slobber-heartedest lily-mindedest piously conniving crowd in the modern world. More
  • I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the... More
  • The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human... More
  • ... the basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation. More
  • There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are... More
  • ... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture. More
  • ... good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine. More
  • The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His... More
  • ... the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his... More
  • ... the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. More
  • The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live. More
  • ... art transcends its limitations only by staying within them. More
  • Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks,... More
  • The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man’s encounter with God is how he... More
  • At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has... More
  • When we talk about the writer’s country we are liable to forget that no matter what particular... More
  • ... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life. More
  • I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with... More
  • We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the... More
  • Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. More
  • The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode. More
  • ... while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. More
  • The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is... More
  • There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of... More
  • Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are... More
  • I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s. But behind all of them... More
  • Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a... More
  • It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes... More

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