Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
Quotes by Flannery O'Connor
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.
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.
It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth.
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.
Mystery isn't something that's gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.
Like Greene or any other writer, when I write I do what I have to with what I can.
...there should be some folks that some things mean more to them than money...
About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do.
Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.

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