Flannery O'Connor Quotes

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.

I'm just writing about people. People are dark and complicated. I'm trying to tell the truth; that's all that I do.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

I let characters be human and flawed and relatable.

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.

I've had that situation where I start writing somebody really miserable, and in order to make the story come alive, I have to give them a vote of confidence, make him vulnerable or wounded. But in real life, you often meet people who, in that particular moment, actually shouldn't get a vote of confidence.

I never base a character on someone I know. You can get ideas from real life, but every character you write is some aspect of yourself.

For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels, I was asked why, and the metaphor I came up with was about poems as rooms. You can make a room perfect, but then you have to shut the door and never go back, whereas a novel is like a house - it can never be perfect, but you can make a life in it.

Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

I think that as a writer your responsibility is to search for and stir up the things that are in this world. There is violence in all of us, and beauty, and strength, and weakness. What's my job? To only write about the good and the beauty, or is it to write about all of it? That's my greater responsibility, to write about them as I see them and as they are.

Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.

Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don't know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.

Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.

My writing, it's mostly fiction, but I want it to feel intimate and real.

So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.

There's this thing in Hollywood about the sympathetic character and likability. I've never understood that because the people I love most in my life are not likable all the time. My wife is not always likable. I'm certainly not always likable. My dad is not always likable. We're human beings.

We are writing fiction, but we are trying to create a world that's believable.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.