Flannery O'Connor Quotes

Yankees don't understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different.

I'm very aware when I'm speaking to the English of how flat my Mid-Atlantic American voice is.

I speak with a Northern Irish accent with a tinge of New York. My wife has a bit of a Boston accent; my oldest daughter talks with a Denver accent, and my youngest has a true blue Aussie accent. It's complicated.

Tell me the truth - do you think I've lost my Southern accent? I feel it comes back to me only when I'm shouting at fights or at baseball games.

They seem to be charmed by my Southern accent.

I can hardly understand the Australian accent.

When I heard Puerto Ricans in New York City, it sounded very strange. And the first time I heard someone from Spain, I thought they had a speech impediment!

I, on the other hand, have a bit of a southern accent.

I just love dialects; they're really fun.

I find standard American the hardest. It really fits in a different place in your mouth. Southern, I find the easiest. If you talk to a dialect coach and you get sort of technical, where an English person keeps their voice in their throat, a Southern person does the same, and it's got the same sort of music to talking.

Well, American dialects have been studied for a hundred years or so.

I love accents. It's a great way to separate yourself when playing a role.

I'm not against accents - my husband's from Lancashire and has a rural Lancs accent. We've just got back from Scotland yesterday, and I love that Highland burr.

My interest in the linguistic differences between women and men grew from research I conducted early in my career on conversations between speakers of different ethnic and regional backgrounds.

I love accents in general. I'm obsessed with dialects, and I had to write a whole movie about it called 'In a World...'

You don't do classics with a Texas accent.

I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.

I have the thickest accent of any Nova Scotian you've ever imagined.

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

You might say that certain words are only pegs to hang intonations on.

Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.

If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.

I think dialects should be left alone. People should write in whatever dialect they feel they want to write. In the fullness of time, these dialects will sort themselves out.

Accents are funny in that they have this odd draw for us, yet we forget we have one, too. No one is without an accent, but the one you’ve got seems like oatmeal to their caviar.

It's like a puzzle, putting together your individual accent and what you grew up with or what you heard. It must be insane to be a dialect coach, to balance all that out.