More quotes by Flannery O'Connor

"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."
"Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better."
"The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode."
"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."
"People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them."