“The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.”
More from Flannery O'Connor on Writing
“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.”
“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
“There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and...”
Flaubert
9 quotes“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of gen...”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”
Madeleine L'Engle
6 quotes“A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”
William Faulkner
6 quotes“A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.”