Flannery O'Connor

"The author does not argue or explain but acts; he conducts his reader through an experience."

"The difficulty of the modern writer is that he has no adequate framework within which to work."

"The fiction writer has to be capable of at least entertaining the proposition that something might be."

"In modern times we have invented the useful terminology of identifying ourselves by our feelings."

"The Catholic Church has a lot to offer a writer in the way of material and in the way of a system in which to work."

"The business of the fiction writer is to imagine that action the way a reader would have to imagine it."

"The writer is bound to find the truth even if he does not set out to find it."

"The novelist cannot do anything else but write novels unless he repudiates the whole thing."

"I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation."

"A story must have a spine, a feeling, a conviction."

"The author must be able to project himself into other people in such a way that he can imagine their actions."

"The good writer is the one who can see what is there rather than what he thinks ought to be there."

"The writer's true country is his own world; he should not flee from it."

"I am always irritated by the notion that when you are not writing, you are wasting your time."

"In good fiction, certain of the details will tend to accumulate meaning from the story itself."

"The writer is one who has learned that there is as much to be said about nothing as about something."

"A writer has to have a temperament before he can know a subject."

"The sense in which I believe in the supernatural is not a matter of the senses."

"The writer who would be good must get to know his own province."

"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."

"The most important thing is the pattern that the work makes in the mind of the reader."

"A story is a complete act, and not an account of it."

"The writer of any discipline must be in some fashion like a bum."

"The writer has only one language to work with, and that is the language of his own time."

"The very action of grace is an interruption in the course of affairs as the world understands them."

"I believe that there are many rough drafts of stories swimming around in the heads of people who never write."

"The writer is always trying to convey what he cannot say."

"The question of spiritual order is one that the fiction writer must always contemplate."

"A writer's task is to make concrete the things that people are only vaguely aware of."

"The writer who would be good should begin by understanding the limitations of language."