Flannery O'Connor

“A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.”

“If you want to get anywhere in religion, you got to keep it sweet.”

“She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.”

“The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a s...”

“The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election.”

“I don't know which is worse—to have a bad teacher or no teacher at all. In any case, I believe the teacher's work should be largely negative. He can't put the gift into you, but if he finds...”

“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.”

“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 o...”

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

“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”

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

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

“At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.”

“Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”

“I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again...”

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

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”

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