Quote

Today is Flannery O'Connor's birthday, so this quote from The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor.

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, brutal, etc.

And, of course, this from "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which sums up most of my characters pretty well (and me).

"She would of been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

There hasn't been a whole lot written that I've found more useful when writing than those two. Probably only this from Faulkner's Nobel Speech, which has been on my mind a lot lately.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.