Wit and Wisdom of Flannery O'Connor

For the fun of it, I began rereading "Mystery and Manners", by Flannery O'Connor, a book mostly about writing which is made up of different conferences, lectures and essays she wrote for different occasions, and which were collected and published by her estate after her death. I had read it back in the 1970's and underlined some statements she made because they jumped off the page at me at the time. They still do. Here are some of her observations for your enjoyment.

.....I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to a writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually it frees the story-teller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing by guaranteeing his respect for mystery....

.....Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause....

{To write}...is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self knowledge is humility, and this is not a virtue conspicuous in any national character....

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.....

...To call yourself a Georgia writer is certainly to declare a limitation, but one which, like all limitations, is a gateway to realty....

....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....

....There may never be anything new to say, but there is always anew way to say it...

....People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. They don't take long looks at anything because they lack the courage....

....I think it is usually some form of self-inflation that destroys the free use of a gift. This may be the pride of the reformer or of the theorist, or it may only be that simple-minded self-appreciation which uses its own sincerity as a standard of truth...

....St.Thomas called art 'reason in making'. This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, it is because reason has lost ground among us...

....nothing produces silence like experience...

...I have found, in short, from reading my own writing that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil, I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil...