Flannery O'Connor

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do.

...there should be some folks that some things mean more to them than money...

Like Greene or any other writer, when I write I do what I have to with what I can.

Mystery isn't something that's gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.

You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has its end in its audience. Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth.

But the writer doesn't have to understand, only produce. And what makes him produce is not having the experience but contemplating the experience, and contemplating it doesn't mean understanding it so much as understanding he doesn't understand it.

Whatever you do anyway, remember that these things are mysteries and that if they were such that we could understand them, they wouldn't be worth understanding.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.