“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. …Now in every writing class you find people who care nothing for writing, because they think they are already writers by virtue of some experience they’ve had….I believe myself that these people should be stifled with all deliberate speed. “
Flannery O’Connor: The Nature and Aim of Fiction
“From my own experience in trying to make stories “work”, I have discovered that what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action which indicates that grace has been offered. And frequently it is an action in which the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace.”
Flannery O’Connor, On Her Own Work
“Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning…our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. “
Flannery O’Connor, Total Effect and the Eighth Grade
“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking all together, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration.”
Flannery O’Connor, The Grotesque in Southern Fiction
“Well, if it’s just a symbol, then to hell with it.”
Flannery O’Connor
TimothyOne 