Flannery O'Connor Quotes

I think the way you become a good storyteller is to read a lot of stories and evaluate them in your own mind.

If one loves stories, then one would naturally love the story of the story. Or the story behind the story, pick your preposition. It does seem to me to be a kind of animal impulse almost, a mammalian curiosity. For a reader to wonder about the autobiography in a fiction may be completely unavoidable and in fact may speak to the success of a particular narrative, though it may also speak to its failure.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

I used to be more of a purist about literature. I thought, 'If it's a really propulsive story, then maybe there's something unliterary about it.'

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

I think that whenever a book is not a challenge, I'm telling the wrong story.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.

I wasn't going to be a college kid. The only subject I was interested in was English. I think I had a subconscious interest in analyzing story.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

I'll take any story if it's good.

All literature is gossip.

Usually when I read something, first of all I'm looking for the story and then when I reread it, I'm sort of checking every part of it to see if every scene is necessary.

No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value.

A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.

Most writers of entertainment fiction tend to receive controversial reviews.

It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.

Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

There are a million ideas in a world of stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Everything's a story, everyone's got stories, we're perceiving stories, we're interested in stories. So to me, the big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story.

I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work.

If you tell an amateur that his story is not good, he always declares indignantly: 'Oh, but it really happened just like this!' The writer who doesn't understand that this is beside the point is not a writer at all.

I always find it fun to read a script and then find the messages in the script because I believe every story has them.

If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how "important" it is?