Flannery O'Connor Life Quotations

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

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

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

When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.

Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by a strong devotion to the Bible, which has kept our minds attached to the concrete and the living symbol.

I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.

She would of been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.