WHAT EXPERIENCE DO WRITERS NEED?

'We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery and Manners, p.84. 

THE LIMITS OF FICTION

'It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever got away with much.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery and Manners, p.76. 

SYMBOLISM

'Now the word symbol scares a good many people off, just as the word art does. They seem to feel that a symbol is some mysterious thing put in arbitrarily by the writer to frighten the common reader - sort of a literary Masonic grip that is only for the initiated. They seem to think that it is a way of saying something that you aren't actually saying, and so if they can be got to read a reputedly symbolic work at all, they approach it as if it were a problem in algebra. Find x. And when they do find or think they find this abstraction, x, then they go off with an elaborate sense of satisfaction and the notion that they have "understood" the story. Many students confuse the process of understanding a thing with understanding it.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery and Manners, p.71. 

WHAT MAKES WRITING ENGAGING?

'A lady who writes, and whom I admire very much, wrote me that she had learned from Flaubert that it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make on object real; and she believes that this is connected with us having five senses. If you're deprived of any of them, you're in a bad way, but if you're deprived of more than two at once, you almost aren't present.' 

Flannery O Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery & Manners, p.69. 

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

'...to know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Fiction Writer & His Country' in Mystery & Manners, p.35. 

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

'When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock - to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Fiction Writer & His Country' in Manners & Mystery, p.34. 

THE ESSENCE OF HUMILITY

'Once, when asked by a student at a lecture, "Miss O'Connor, why do you write?" she answered, "Because I am good at it." At first glance, this reply might seem conceited or proud. But the truth is that knowing what we are good at and what we are not, doing what we are supposed to do, and not what we aren't, being what we are supposed to be and not what we aren't, is the essence of true humility.' 

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.236. 

SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS EXPOSED

'Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vaste horde of souls were rumbling towards heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognised at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile. 

At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible crickets choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.'   

Flannery O'Connor, 'Revelation' in Collected Stories, p.508. 

CHRISTIAN LIVING

'...Push as hard as the age that pushes against you.'
Flannery O'Connor in Tish Harrison, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, p.29. 

OUR AGE

'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.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'Novelist and Believer' in Mystery & Manners, p.159. 

THE CHRISTIAN NOVELIST

'It makes a great difference to the look of a novel whether its author believes that the world came late into being and continues to come by a creative act of God, or whether he believes that the world and ourselves are the product of a cosmic accident. It makes a great difference to his novel whether he believes that we are created in God's image, or whether he believes we create God in our own. It makes a great difference whether he believes our wills are free, or bound like those of the other animals.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'Novelist and Believer' in Mystery & Manners, p.156. 

THE IMPACT OF CHRISTIANITY

'The Judaeo-Christian tradition has formed us in the west; we are bound to it by ties which may often be invisible, but which are there nevertheless. It has formed the shape of our secularism; it has formed even the shape of modern atheism.'

Flannery O'Connor, 'Novelist and Believer' in Mystery & Manners, p.155. 

CHRISTIAN READING & WRITING OF FICTION

'It is when the individual's faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and where there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the supernatural is apt gradually to be lost. Fiction, made according to its own laws, is an antidote to such a tendency, for it renews our knowledge that we live in the mystery from which we draw our abstractions.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Church and the Fiction Writer' in Mystery and Manners, p.146. 

PORNOGRAPHY

'Pornography....is essentially sentimental, for it leaves out the connection of sex with its hard purpose, and so far disconnects it from its meaning in life as to make it simply an experience for its own sake.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Church and the Fiction Writer' in Mystery and Manners, p.148. 

CHRISTIAN WRITERS

'The Catholic writer, insofar as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for. But this should enlarge, not narrow, his field of vision.'
Flannery O'Connor, 'The Church and the Fiction Writer' in Mystery and Manners, p.146. 

IMPATIENCE

'...I would like to be a mystic and immediately.' 

Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal, p.38. 

SEX

'The Sex act is a religious act & and when it occurs without God is a mock act or at best an empty act. Proust is right that only a love which does not satisfy can continue. Two people can remain "in love" - a phrase made practically useless by stinking romanticism - only if their common desire for each other unites in a greater desire for God - i.e., they do not become satisfied but more desirous together of the supernatural love in union with God.'

Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal, p.31.

RELATIONSHIPS

'Man's desire for God is bedded in his unconscious & seeks to satisfy itself in physical possession of another human. This necessarily is a passing, fading attachment in its sensuous aspects since it is a poor substitute for what the unconscious is after. The more conscious the desire for God becomes the more successful the union with another becomes because the intelligence realizes the relation in its relation to a greater desire & if this intelligence is in both parties the motive power in the desire for God becomes double & gains in becoming God-like. The modern man isolated from faith, from raising his desire for God into a conscious desire, is sunk in the position of seeing physical love as an end in itself. Thus his romanticizing it, wallowing in it, & then cynicizing it.' 

Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal, p.30.

ATHEISM

'No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist. \\\the devil is the greatest believer & he has his reasons.' 

Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal,  p.25. 

WRITING

'If I ever do get to be a fine writer, it will not be because I am a fine writer but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me.' 

Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal, p.23.