Flannery O'Connor

"One of the terrors for the Catholic writer is that they feel hemmed in by doctrine."

"The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet."

"I believe the writer should serve the truth, even if the truth is strange."

"Most of us come to the Church by a means the Church does not allow."

"The novelist is characteristically downstream from the culture."

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

"If you don't know the Lord, you can know that you're separated from Him."

"There's many a prophet been put in the ditch by folks wanting to make him stop."

"I'm a writer because I have to be."

"The grotesque is the only way I am able to say what I have to say."

"Writing is not a gift but a skill that must be worked at."

"I have always been of the mind that when the going gets rough, the tough get going."

"We are ultimately alone, and we cannot protect ourselves from suffering."

"One reason we don't recognize our period while we're in it is because we're too busy living it."

"The reader who picks up a book by a Catholic author must expect to find virtue difficult and grace abundant."

"If there is no God, then all our efforts are useless from the start."

"I think the most important thing is for the work to be true."

"The novelist cannot operate without grace."

"My characters often surprise me, and I trust that element of surprise."

"We are responsible for the world we create in our stories."

"The South is full of what unlettered people think of as grotesque and I am one of them myself."

"Good manners can open doors that the best education cannot."

"To know oneself is to know God."

"A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper."

"The writer's concern must always be the truth that underlies apparent truth."

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel a responsibility for the deeds and conduct of others."

"The fact is that most of us are brought low by the same experience that we are also exalted by."

"In the absence of love, we must demand justice."

"We are all grotesque, each in our own way."

"The writer is only free when he can tell the truth, and the truth is always strange."