Flannery O'Connor Quotes

Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

Musicians have to suffer to a certain degree in order to obtain their outlet.

Songwriting is Hell on Earth. If it isn't, then you're doing it wrong.

There's way too much pain in this business for anyone who doesn't HAVE to write.

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'

Most difficult thing in the world, to write a play. Do you know the story of Shaw at the Fabian society? H.G. Welles said "I'm terribly sorry I've missed the last five meetings, I've been terribly busy, I'm engaged in writing a scientific pamphlet on the effects of radioactivity in 1984 and I've produced a novel, and various pieces of science fiction to do, and I've had a bit of personal trouble, and I had my copy to bring out for the newspaper." Shaw leapt up and said, "I've not missed one meeting, and I have written a play!" hardest thing in the world. If it were easy they'd all be at it.

A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.

People who paint, including myself, get to a point where a bit of angst comes in. If you're doing it for a living, it's worth it to suffer those slings and arrows.

Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.

No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.

I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?

The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not.

When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.

She said writting novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.

It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.

Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.

Writing is a refuge from unhappiness, but has its own sorrows.

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.