Flannery O'Connor

"You can't be any truer than you can be, and truer than that is nothing."

"I have found that most people are willing to help the writer about their concerns."

"Belief, in the full religious sense, is the experience of ultimate purpose."

"The good of the people is the greatest good."

"You can't evolve past ugliness when practically everything you see is ugly."

"The novelist must begin with an act of the imagination."

"The purpose of art is the revelation of a truth."

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

"What's wrong with today is what's always been wrong—people."

"The truth is, I'm not interested in making a good living."

"I usually write about people in a state of despair."

"The grotesque is the only way I can get the attention of people."

"You have to find what gives you meaning."

"Real writers are those that make you feel something."

"The writer's job is to show the interior life."

"I want to free the reader from the prison of certainty."

"What we write about needs to be what we can bear to know about."

"The reader will soon gather that these stories are about everything that is important."

"Evil is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be endured."

"You learn by your mistakes."

"The end is often a return to the beginning."

"A story might be about people not being well and when it ends they're still not well."

"The writer has to make the reader believe the impossible."

"Everything that rises must converge."

"Kindness is the hardest thing to give away because it comes back to haunt you."

"The purpose of the novel is to uncover the nature of human experience."

"You can't be any good at writing something if you don't tell the truth."

"Redemption does not come cheaply."

"The novelist who denies the possibility of redemption is denying the possibility of meaning."

"I don't believe in writing about the beautiful things just because they are beautiful."