Flannery O'Connor

"Fiction should be both transparent and mysterious."

"The nature of our society is such that the individual in it is essentially alone."

"The worst of the modern inventions of emotion is that the writer is always conscious of adjectives while writing."

"A writer is judged by the subjects he chooses and by what he has to say about them."

"The main concern of the fiction writer is not to convey information but to create experience."

"Idleness is to the human mind what the vacuum is to the physical world."

"It is better to be unfinished than well-finished if it means only that you have finished without looking."

"The Catholic novelist in the South should be entirely free to see his antagonism in terms of region."

"In any case, I claim not to know how the stories come to be, and I am always reading some old lady's advice in a magazine on how to write stories if you want to be a writer."

"The novelist and the believer are separated when they approach the religious problem."

"If you want to be a writer, you have to keep an open mind about suicide."

"A story is a vehicle for meaning in the most direct way possible."

"The writer should never be ashamed of staring; there is nothing that doesn't require his attention."

"The question of a work's popularity is not a concern of the novelist, but of the critic and the reader."

"One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religious thinking into ethical thinking."

"A person with the good writer's temperament is bound to offend."

"I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace."

"The writer must struggle to earn the reader's attention."

"Reality does not constitute truth; it merely offers the raw material for truth."

"The absence of faith in our modern culture is as evident as the absence of air in a room and just about as subtle."

"A writer practices his craft within the context of his own experience."

"All I ever do is write and teach writing, and I intend to continue as long as I live."

"The writer who cuts himself off from his roots will end up with nothing to say."

"There is much to admire in the common man; the uncommon man is usually disappointing."

"The writer has to make the Word flesh without making the Word absurd."

"I don't feel as if I know him until I have written about him for weeks."

"The grotesque has always inhabited the Southern character the way it inhabits the Southern landscape."

"A thing is either sacred or it is not. The laws of the Church bind only those in the Church."

"The writer is initially set going by circumstance and is usually helpless against his material."

"I usually work in a short story form and I never have written a novel."