Pulled Quote April 09 2008
If you’re a writer and the South is what you know, then it’s what you’ll write about and how you judge it will depend on how you judge yourself. It’s perhaps good and necessary to get away from it physically for a while, but this is by no means to escape it. I stayed away from the time I was 20 until I was 25 with the notion that the life of my writing depended on my staying away. I would certainly have persisted in that delusion had I not got very ill and had to come home. The best of my writing has been done here.
– Flannery O’Connor, from The Habit of Being, as quoted in the recently published A Literary Guide to Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia (University of Georgia Press)