522 Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.

The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have to get it in your blood, not in the head.

But learned people can analyze for me why I fear hell and their implication is that there is no hell. But I believe in hell. Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven. No doubt because hell is a more earth-seeming thing. I can fancy the tortures of the damned but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God.

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.

Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.

I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees.