Flannery O'Connor

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

I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.

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

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

...free will does not mean one will but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.

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

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

Doctors always think anybody doing something they arent is a quack also they think all patients are idiots.

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

Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

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.

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

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.

Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.

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.

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

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.

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

A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

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

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

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

The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

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.

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.

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.

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.

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