“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
More from Flannery O'Connor on Writing
“The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.”
“People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.”
“So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.”
“The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.”
“Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.”
“There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“we do not write as we want but as we can”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Writing is prayer.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
Flaubert
9 quotes“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”
Robert Frost
6 quotes“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”