Flannery O'Connor Quotes

I've always played that edge of fact and fiction. I used to be a filmmaker, and certainly in film that's a line that filmmakers cross more readily and more easily than novelists.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

In true-life dramas, you have to do so much research. It's a big responsibility to make sure things are as correct as possible. In 'Robin Hood', you have more artistic license - it's all action, adventure and reaction. This gives everyone a chance to make their characters their own and to make them believable.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.

It's the prerogative of the writer to rewrite the world into one he would like to exist.

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

The fact is, for all the critics' talk about me as a realist, I'm making everything up - everything. It is all about imagining with me.

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

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling.

You write a novel by inventing a world and inventing the rules that govern that world. Then you break the rules when you want to.

In mid-20th-century America, it could be argued that the novelist still had the most claim of anyone to omniscience. Whatever he/she couldn't prove, he/she could gesture at.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

In a book, you can describe a scene and have any song you want playing on the radio and have any painting you want hanging on the wall. That was really freeing to me when I was writing 'Ready Player One.' I could throw in everything that I love.

Sometimes you can publish a first novel in a kind of lyrical flourish, but it is not really a lyrical form. The beautiful truths about the world are more hard won than that. Novels should be bleach boned. It's a question of cumulative observation and lived suffering. It takes time.

A novel compared to film writing can allow the author to be more indulgent, and that extends to the characters and the story being told.

There's a really fine line between artistic license and artistic licentiousness. And history is a lousy filmmaker. It doesn't give you all the ingredients you need. No story will quite fulfill that three-act structure.

I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.

You have to do what the story demands, but inside of those constraints, I try to inject as much realistic physics as I'm allowed to.

All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction.

It's kind of strange-- in fiction you get to tell lies and are applauded for it.