“Bad children are harder to endure than good ones, but they are easier to read about.” 

-Flannery O'Connor

“You always have to work in a room where you’re alone. If you’re in a place where there are only two rooms, get everybody else in that other room.”

-Flannery O'Connor

“The things we see, hear, smell and touch affect us long before we believe anything all…the South impresses its image on the Southern writer from the moment he is able to distinguish one sound from another..”

-Flannery O'Connor

“You’ve got to learn to paint with words.”

-Flannery O'Connor

“Violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality.”

-Flannery O'Connor

“Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”

-Flannery O'Connor

“A Writer is only free when he can tell the reader to go jump in the lake."

-Flannery O'Connor

"Writers pay attention to what we don’t understand rather than what we do.”

-Flannery O'Connor

“A novelist puts the meaning of life in a story by way of odd and specific details – like her description of the grandfather in Wise Blood as a “waspish old man”

-Flannery O'Connor

“A story is about showing. What the fiction writer had to learn wass how to become a graphic artist.”

-Flannery O'Connor

“Fiction operates through the senses…deals with reality through what can be seen.”

-Flannery O'Connor