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"There is a great tendency today to want everybody to write just the way everybody else does, to see and to show the same things in the same way to the same middling audience. But the writer, in order best to use the talents he has been given, has to write at his own intellectual level. For him to do anything else is to bury his talents. This doesn't mean that, within his limitations, he shouldn't try to reach as many people as possible, but it does mean that he must not lower his standards to do so."
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Exlpore more Art quotes
"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding."
"You do not need a boyfriend or a girlfriend to write an emotional poet, because poetry is beyond hooks and holes."
"The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode."
"Music heals all forms of misery."
"The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels."
"The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible."
Explore more quotes by Flannery O'Connor
"To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness."
"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 that our wills are free, or bound like those of the other animals."
"The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location."
"Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing."
"He has the mistaken notion that a concern with grace is a concern with exalted human behavior, that it is a pretentious concern. It is, however, simply a concern with the human reaction to that which, instant by instant, gives life to the soul. It is a concern with a realization that breeds charity and with the charity that breeds action. Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence."
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