Flannery O'Connor Quotes

When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.... Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you'll find it.

I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.

I envisioned all these people who had been admired for having been freaks in their own time, and I saw myself in line with them.

People who don't quite fit society, they are often kind of either under an awful lot of pressure or otherwise not acceptable to the mainstream and that tells us a lot about who we are. The people that don't fit are a great way of reflecting on all of us.

In the South the war is what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it.

In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.

Secret Six has always had a special place in the DCU, just because they're the misfits. The content is a little bit different than the rest of the mainstream titles. It has a completely different tone than any of the other books out there.

We’re freaks, that’s all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that’s all. We’re the tattooed lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too.

It's so nice to be insane, no one asks you to explain.

I like playing misfits, I like playing oddballs, I like playing characters with rough edges.

Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don't get out much. It's true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well.

Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana.

Alienation produces eccentrics or revolutionaries.

My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths.

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

I'm not sure what the proper label might be, or the most accurate one, but someone once called my stuff Southern Ohio Gothic and I thought that was fair.

The South has more of a disproportionate amount of irony on T-shirts than any other region in the country.

The landscape in Montgomery and in the South is just saturated with imagery. Markers are everywhere. There's a marker for the first Confederate post office, there's a marker for a ball that Robert E. Lee hosted, there's a marker for where Jefferson Davis had a meeting. We love reminding people about all that was going on in the mid-nineteenth century.

It's quite a thing, if you've never been in or known a small southern town. The people are not particularly sophisticated, naturally. They're not worldly wise in any way. But they tell you a story whenever they see you.

I didn't think I had much of a following in the South. I thought I was anonymous down there so I kept to the South. But I found in certain pockets that I was quite recognizable and I just hit a wig store.

There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.

In the past, I've felt like an outsider, with New York the center of everything literary, but right now, there are new opportunities being created that let us tell stories in the South, whether the medium is writing or TV or reality TV.

I've always felt like such an outsider in this industry. Because I'm so insane I guess.

Normal people do not create art.