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Flannery O'Connor

Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction
(1960)

The great novels we get in the future are not going to be those that the public thinks it wants, or those that critics demand. They are going to be the kind of novels that interest the novelist. And the novels that interest the novelist are those that have not already been written. They are those that put the greatest demands on him, that require him to operate at the maximum of his intelligence and his talents, and to be true to the particularities of his own vocation. The direction of many of us will be more toward poetry than toward the traditional novel.

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And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking.
et aspiciens ait video homines velut arbores ambulantes
— Mark 8:24
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My advice is to start reading and writing and looking and listening. Pay less attention to yourself than to what is outside you and if you must write about yourself, get a good distance away and judge yourself with a stranger’s eyes and a stranger’s severity.
—

Flannery O’Connor

O’Connor, F. (1987) Conversations with Flannery O’Connor. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi. p. 17