top of page
"The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Creativity quotes

"You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover."

"Imagination is phenomenal."

"The future is created by those who have a great imagination and the will to make it a reality by their actions."

"Develop your own skills and styles. In music, designing, electronics, etc., you may have a peculiar way of exposing your dreams in an uncommon way."

"A creative mind is a spark of divinity."

"Flawed genius is better than flawless talent."

"People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think."

"I write to fill my mind with the ecstasy of life."

"If imagination is your wealth, then ideas are your abode."
Explore more quotes by Flannery O'Connor

"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."

"The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem."

"From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don't look for what is hidden. It is a sign of maturity not to be scandalized and to try to find explanations in charity."

"I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow."

"Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you."

"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."

"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."
bottom of page