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.
Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.
The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.
I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.
I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.
The meaning of the story is the story.
A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.
There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.
She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.
The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.
Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration from without. It was the only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered it but from it he could see her with absolute clarity.
The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.
We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.
The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.
. . . the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.
It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.
Once the process [of conversion] is begun and continues. . . you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity. . . you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to turn away from it. I measure God by everything I am not. I begin with that.
Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.
Kindness and patience were always called for.
For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.