Flannery O'Connor

“A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.”

“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.”

“There won't be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy.”

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

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

“The writer has no rights at all except those he forges for himself inside his own work. We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties, or on the notion that fiction must represent the typical, that in the public mind the deeper kinds of realism are less and less understandable.”

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”

“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.”

“His friends told him that nobody was interested in his goddam soul unless it was the priest and he managed to answer that no priest taking orders from no pope was going to tamper with his soul. They told him he didn't have any soul and left for the brothel.He took a long time to believe them because he wanted to believe them. All he wanted was to believe them and get rid of it once and for all, and he saw opportunity here to get rid of it without corruption, to be converted to nothing instead of to evil. The army sent him halfway around the world and forgot him. He was wounded and they remembered him long enough to take the shrapnel out of his chest - they said they took it out but they never showed it to him and he felt it still in there, rusted, and poisoning him - and then they sent him to another desert and forgot him again. He had all the time he could want to study his soul in and assure himself that it was not there. When he was thoroughly convinced, he saw that this was something that he had always known.”

“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.”

“Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin.”

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

“The fact is that if the writer's attention is on producing a work of art, a work that is good in itself, he is going to take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to this central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses. They call attention to themselves and distract from the work as a whole.”

“No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist.”

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

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

“...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.”

“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.”

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

“That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.”