Flannery O'Connor

Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.

What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.

Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are

He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery.

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.

The reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding.

Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.

People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.

The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.

There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.

Grace changes us and change is painful".

No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.

...the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

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.