Flannery O'Connor Quotes

All this is rather pretentious and fey to even talk about, but Flannery O'Connor sat down to write stories. The rest of us, some of us, don't have that kind of wit and genius. We don't do that. We sit down and have some accidents.

My job is to put words together and tell a story. If that doesn't work for you, it's not a war crime.

I'm not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or 'let the characters speak through me,' whatever that might mean.

When I write, I try not to cast in my head, because then I'm writing to a major movie star, and it picks up those ticks, and that's not what I want to do.

In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

I prefer writing originals.

I like it when I can hear directly from the writer: what they're seeing, what they're envisioning, and what their intention is.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

I know it may sound silly, but I think my short stories have a life and identity of their own. They crop up in all sorts of places.

I think writing is such a great talent, and if I was better, I would love to be a writer.

I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of play.

I've always loved writing, and the impulse for me is storytelling. I don't sit down and think: 'What political message can I sell?' I love the creativity of it.

I've written many nonfiction books, but that's a special gift.

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

I think you can be taught to write. You can't be taught to be a good writer. For that, you have to bring something to it, yourself, something that can't be given to you.

You know how it is with writing. You just write what you want to write. There's no way to predict what is good or bad. You just do what you think is funny, and either it works or you're finished. It's impossible to predict anything.

I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

I think that if you have a knack for storytelling, and you work really hard at it, you'll have a chance to tap into something deep. But the fact remains that good sentences are hard won. Any writer worth a lick knows constructing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is hard work.

I find that screenwriting is at best kind of a hackwork in some ways.

I write as well as I can. I'm a journalist at heart, so it's the story that matters.

When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.

It's fun. I sit down every day and tell stories. Some folk would kill to get that chance.

What I'm trying to do is to write a story. If you take something from it, that's wonderful; if you don't, that's wonderful as well.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.