Friday, November 19, 2010

Excerpt

"I believe that the writer's moral sense must coincide with his dramatic sense and this means that moral judgement has to be implicit in the act of vision. Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas. I find that this in no way limits my freedom as a writer and that it increases rather than decreases my vision. It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing."

-Flannery O'Connor, from The Habit of Being, pg. 147

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