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
I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Excellence
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
The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.
—Flannery O’Connor
Topics: Experience
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
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
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
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, Teachers, Teaching, Authors & Writing, Writers
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- John Irving American Novelist
- Margaret Mitchell American Novelist
- Amy Tan Chinese-American Novelist
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Maxine Hong Kingston American Novelist, Memoirist
- Anne Rice American Author
- Kate Chopin American Novelist, Short-Story Writer
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