Here is a brief selection of observations by Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She is considered one of the best short story authors of the 20th century. She wrote about religious themes and southern life.

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There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I’m afraid it will not be controversial.

The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.

Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.

Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

I don’t deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

I do not know You, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make come live.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

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.

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Mary Flannery O’Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.

She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and supposedly grotesque characters, often in violent situations. The unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations or imperfection or difference of these characters (whether attributed to disability, race, crime, religion or sanity) typically underpins the drama.

Her writing reflected her Roman Catholic religion and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. Her posthumously compiled Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and has been the subject of enduring praise.

Here is a direct link to more information about her life and work .