Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

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

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

I do not know You, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.

Flannery O'Connor
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
Flannery O'Connor

The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor

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.