Flannery O'Connor

While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.

Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.

In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.

You can’t clobber any reader while he’s looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.

The writer is only free when he can tell the reader to go jump in the lake. You want, of course, to get what you have to show across to him, but whether he likes it or not is no concern of the writer.

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama . . . . Either one is serious about salvation or one is not.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

Flannery O'Connor

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