Flannery O'Connor

"The mystery in fiction is the mystery in life."

"A good writer is one who invents truths."

"The writer's task is to deepen the reader's moral sense."

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

"I write to discover what I believe."

"Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better."

"The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make them believable."

"A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way."

"You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd."

"The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it."

"Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all."

"There is no reason to expect that because we are Christians God will make us feel good."

"The Christian writer is not so much divorced from the world as he is grafted into it."

"I am no friend of the modernist writer, but I am opposed to censoring him."

"The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always."

"Whatever the narrative contents, the form of the story will always be the action of grace."

"A person without a self cannot acknowledge it and is caught off guard by his own behavior."

"The fact is that much current opinion is so sloppy that one cannot even quarrel with it."

"It is easy enough to see that if one is surrounded by darkness, one becomes dark."

"The Good is something under construction."

"One should as soon expect to find the moral of the Interpretation of Dreams in a cookbook."

"A God you fully understand is no God at all."

"Every piece of fiction requires a degree of concentration and attention from the reader."

"The operation of the Church is entirely set for the sinner; which creates no little confusion among the good."

"To know oneself is to know the world, and to know the world is to know God."

"I think that what the Church has to offer the world is either everything or nothing."

"The serious writer is not at liberty to ignore such phenomena as grace."

"It is better to be wrong than to be vague."

"The writer's business is to uncover and to interpret human experience."

"I prefer the grotesque to the sentimental because writing graphically about the grotesque forces us to look at the world as it is."