The World According to Flannery O'Connor
I just read Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, a collection of the nonfiction writings of Flannery O'Connor. She was a notorious oddball who holed up on a Georgia farm with a flock(?) of peacocks and wrote some of the most haunting, gruesome stories to come out of the 20th century.
Here are some of her greatest hits:
- “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.” from “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction”
- “I’ve had a hard time all along with the title of that book [The Violent Bear It Away]. It’s always been called The Valiant Bear It Always and The Violets Bloom Away, and recently a friend of mine went into a bookstore looking for a copy of my stories and he claims that the clerk said, ‘We don’t have those but we have another book by that person. It’s called The Bear That Ran Away With It.’” from “The Regional Writer”
- “The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.” from “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”
- “Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.” from “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”
- “Some people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.” from “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”
- “If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.” from "The Nature and Aim of Fiction"
- “Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.” from "Writing Short Stories"
- “A story that is any good can’t be reduced, it can only be expanded. A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and when it continues to escape you. In fiction two and two is always more than four.” from "Writing Short Stories"
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