522 Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.

I don’t want any of this artificial superficial feeling stimulated by the choir. Today I have proved myself a glutton—​for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.

It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them - in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries.

You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will.

She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.

Policy and politics generally go contrary to principle.

If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.

The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.