Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Manners
There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naive that may have been, it was a good deal less naive than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Books, Literature
I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Excellence
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Teaching, Writers
If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.
—Flannery O’Connor
To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life, and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Realistic Expectations
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Experience
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