Flannery O'Connor

"The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode."

"Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them."

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

"You know,"Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!"

"People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them."

"Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them."

"If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now."

"Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better."

"The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”(August 9, 1955)"

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

"She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity."

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."

"Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better."

"I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted."

"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."

"Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got."