The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
Interpretation
A writer controls their subjects but not the essence of their creations.
Flannery O'Connor's quote suggests that while a writer has the freedom to choose the topics they write about, the true depth and vitality of their work come from an intrinsic quality that is beyond their control. This emphasizes the idea that creativity is a complex interplay of intention and inspiration, where the writer's ability to breathe life into their words is governed by factors that are often mysterious and unpredictable.
In practice
A motivational speech for aspiring writers at a literary event.
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.
What people donβt realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are
He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery.
But that's not what an actor does. An actor finds things in the moment with a director and other actors that you don't have time to hand-draw or animate with a computer.
Reruns are wonderful because it usually indicates that they had something going for them to begin with and that's why you're still looking at them. And in both my shows, The Dick Van Dyke Show and the last one, they were so well written and so good they hold up.
To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.
There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.
The problem of architecture has always been the same throughout time. Its authentic quality is reached through its proportions, and the proportions cost nothing. In fact, most of them are proportions among things, not the things themselves. Art is almost always a question of proportions.
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