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
You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will.
A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.
Policy and politics generally go contrary to principle.
The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.
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 meaning of the story is the story.
Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.
Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.
I write to discover what I know.
I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.
Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.
Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.