Frank O'Connor

"The main thing is to tell a story"

"Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, and loose ends up all over the place"

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you"

"The way to do is to be"

"A writer's life is hell, but the only life worth living"

"I think we might discover that our personality is more a physical thing than we think it is, that perhaps what we are able to do is to create the physical equivalent of whatever the personality may be"

"Art is the effort of man to express, not to expose, himself"

"The greatest tradition in literature is one of love and beauty"

"You must make up your mind to a kind of perpetual discontent"

"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment"

"A good story should make you forget yourself"

"The writer is the secretary of humanity"

"A writer must take the position that he writes for his time and for all time"

"The test of literature is, I think, whether it gives you something to think about"

"One cannot really be angry with someone who admires one's work"

"A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of one's experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead"

"Memory is the only thing that binds us together across time"

"The creative act is a letting go, not a grasping"

"Every story is about a man who loses his paradise"

"The human heart is the only book worth reading"

"There is a quality of loneliness that cannot be fully expressed or understood"

"What is history but the record of human loneliness?"

"One can never know about days that haven't happened yet"

"The difference between a story and a tale is that a story is about how people feel, and a tale is about what people do"

"Friendship is the only cure for hatred, the only guarantee of peace"

"A writer's duty is to tell the truth as he sees it"

"The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power"

"Art is the effort of human beings to escape from their condition"

"We are all so much the creatures of what we read and what we hear around us"

"The great business of life is to be, to do, to do without, and to depart"