Flannery O'Connor Quotes

Sometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.

I have no problem twisting the facts if it's the only way I can be true to the moment.

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

Only lawyers and painters can turn white to black.

They were cherry-picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it that fit their overall interpretation. Worse than that, they were dropping qualifiers and distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem even more alarmist and dangerous than the information that we were giving them.

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

There are some people in this world who always turn and twist the spoken word out of proportion.

People are more likely to believe a big lie than a small one.

Artistic license sneered through the thin fabric.

You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.

An animal can learn to fight, but to sing beautiful things and make people believe them.

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done?

There should be a name for this, for the process whereby one knows one is being yanked and concedes it has been done successfully - that one is grateful to have been spun. In the theater, it is called the willing suspension of disbelief. That's what allows the play to make an impact on the audience: they have to be able to make believe that what's happening on the stage is really happening. Maybe to a degree it is a requirement for all political participation, all effective political communication, too.

He who attempts to make others believe in means which he himself despises is a puffer; he who makes use of more means than he knows to be necessary is a quack; and he who ascribes to those means a greater efficacy than his own experience warrants is an impostor.

Donald Trump is a master salesman. And he creates his own reality. So if he tells you, "This is a middle-class tax cut, and I, Donald Trump, won't benefit," he expects you to believe that. It doesn't matter that it's not true. It's he said it, you're supposed to believe it. And that's how he's run his entire administration. If he says it, that makes it true.

You can't really pretend something is rosier than it is and expect people to buy it.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which like a fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.

People understand what art is supposed to look like, and so it's easy to make something that looks like art but isn't - especially in an abstract form.

The fun of being in the pop world is you can really play with people's perceptions of what the word pop means.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Everything about the left is perception, manipulation, and lies. Everything. Everything is 'Wag the Dog.' Everything is a structured deception.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

You could put it that way if you wanted to cause people concern. On the other hand, you could report it as I said it.