Quotessence
Home / Books / Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Book by Flannery O'Connor · 31 quotes · Writing, Fiction, Stories

Filter quotes by topic

AllWritingFictionStoriesIfsPeopleWayFiction WritersFiction WritingLiteratureNovelWriters On WritingAbleArtDoeKindMeanMysteryBeliefCharacterEnough

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose Quotes

“He has the mistaken notion that a concern with grace is a concern with exalted human behavior, that it is a pretentious concern. It is, however, simply a concern with the human reaction to that which, instant by instant, gives life to the soul. It is a concern with a realization that breeds charity and with the charity that breeds action. Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence.”

WritingGraceHuman NatureRedemptionFiction Writing
Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Create image

“Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him. This doesn't mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that. It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported. Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama.”

WritingCharacterStorytellingPlotWriters On WritingFiction WritingWriting FictionHow To WriteHow To Write FictionHow To Write A NovelShow Don T TellShow Dont Tell
Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Create image

“Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.”

WritingFictionNovelWritersWriters On WritingWriting QuotesHow To Write Fiction
Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Create image

“I'll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I'll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as "the technique of the short story" or "the technique of the novel." Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.”

WritingFictionTechniqueStorytellingWriters On WritingFiction NovelFiction WritingNovel WritingWriting FictionWriting TipsStory WritingNovelistHow To WriteHow To Write FictionHow To Write A Novel
Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Create image

“There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful—the myth of the "lonely writer," the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him. This is a common cliché, a hangover probably from the romantic period and the idea of the artist as a Sufferer and a Rebel. Probably any of the arts that are not performed in a chorus-line are going to come in for a certain amount of romanticizing, but it seems to me particularly bad to do this to writers and especially fiction writers, because fiction writers engage in the homeliest, and most concrete, and most unromanticizable of all arts. I suppose there have been enough genuinely lonely suffering novelists to make this seem a reasonable myth, but there is every reason to suppose that such cases are the result of less admirable qualities in these writers, qualities which have nothing to do with the vocation of writing itself.”

WritingWriters On WritingWriting ProcessWriting LifeFiction WritersArtists LifeNovelistWriting MindsetNovelists LifeLonely WriterWriting Myths
Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Create image

“I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don't have it, you might as well forget it. But I have found that people who don't have it are frequently the ones hell-bent on writing stories. I'm sure anyway that they are the ones who write the books and the magazine articles on how-to-write-short-stories. I have a friend who is taking a correspondence course in this subject, and she has passed a few of the chapter headings on to me—such as, "The Story Formula for Writers," "How to Create Characters," "Let's Plot!" This form of corruption is costing her twenty-seven dollars.”

WritingTalentTechniqueWritersWriters On WritingWriting ProcessFiction WritingWriting FictionHow To WriteWriting BooksHow To Write FictionWriting SkillsWriting TalentWriting Class
Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Create image

“You may say that the serious writer doesn't have to bother about the tired reader, but he does, because they are all tired. One old lady who wants her heart lifted up wouldn't be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club. I used to think it should be possible to write for some supposed elite, for the people who attend universities and sometimes know how to read, but I have since found that though you may publish your stories in Botteghe Oscure, if they are any good at all, you are eventually going to get a letter from some old lady in California, or some inmate of the Federal Penitentiary or the state insane asylum or the local poorhouse, telling you where you have failed to meet his needs.”

WritingAudienceWriters On Writing
Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Create image

“In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel's worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story. In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.”

WritingTalentCreative WritingWriting TalentWriting ClassWriting Skill
Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Create image

“A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.”

WayWritingSaidStoriesWould BeAsksFictionStatementsAbstractInadequate
Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Create image

“The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.”

IfsShouldWritingWellsLittlesSchoolPastLiteratureOpportunitySocialUnderstandingResponsibilityTeachDemocracyStudyTeacherLandStudentsLessonsTasteHigh SchoolCustomsFulfillingSocial StudiesEnglish TeacherSchool English
Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Create image

“There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.”

WorldWritingWellsLooksWholeRememberCertainFictionQualityObjectsSeriousStupidityWhole WorldCraftsStaringGrainFiction Writers
Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Create image

“Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.”

WritingMindDifferentStoriesGrowsCasesWrittenMaterialsAccountsTechniqueFormulas
Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Create image

“I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.”

PeopleIfsKnowsWritingWellsEnoughUseKillingPublishingWriting Well
Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Create image