top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Writer quotes
"I'm a schoolteacher and a writer. So that's what I do."
"As a very experienced writer once told me, 'It's in the rewrites'."
"Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers."
"I think Juan stopped short - he got halfway to the destination and got off the train. He is certainly an excellent writer and a good person, but I'm not a nationalist."
"If I have any regrets, I could say that I'm sorry I wasn't a better writer or a better singer."
"Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright."
"I was never really a writer, I was always more of a performer."
Explore more quotes by 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."
"Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look."
"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 story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it."
"The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location."
"You may ask, why not simply call this literature Christian? Unfortunately, the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart. And a golden heart would be a positive interference in the writing of fiction."
"The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem."
"Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them."
"Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days."
"Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work. He said this was the law of life and it was no way to get around it because it was inscribed on the human heart like love thy neighbour. He said these two laws were the team that worked together to make the world go round and that any individual who wanted to be a success and win the pursuit of happiness, that was all he needed to know."
bottom of page