Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor
Mary Flannery O'Connorwas an American writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, she wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. Her writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. Her posthumously-compiled Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 March 1925
CitySavannah, GA
CountryUnited States of America
Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.
... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.
Elizabeth Hardwick told me once that all her first drafts sounded as if a chicken had written them. So do mine for the most part.
Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.
When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.
Kindness and patience were always called for ...
I don’t want any of this artificial superficial feeling stimulated by the choir. Today I have proved myself a glutton—for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.
The meaning of the story is the story.
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.
Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too.
She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.
She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint...
The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.
I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.