Conviction without experience makes for harshness. (1955) — Flannery O'Connor

"The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience."

"A story is a way to say something that cant be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. ("Writing Short Stories")"

"I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are. ("Writing Short Stories")"

"The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions."

"No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made."

"The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location. ("The Regional Writer")"