Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.
I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be out of it. Nobody could then 'smile darkly and ignore the howls. ' Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.
Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.
I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.
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.
I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.
[Simone Weil's] life is almost a perfect blend of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny.
the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.
Christianity is a strangely cheery religion.
If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity.
The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which is both natural and supernatural--understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.
I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.
No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.
My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her finger inside the cup.
I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.
A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.
The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
I write to discover what I know.
He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, 'I ain't got any tattoo on my back. ' 'What you got on it?' the girl said. 'My shirt,' Parker said. 'Haw. ' 'Haw, haw,' the girl said politely.
I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.