Flannery O'Connor Literature Quotations

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

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.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.

Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

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

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.

I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.

the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.