"There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher"
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O'Connor lands the joke like a gavel: the bestseller, that sacred cow of American letters, is framed not as evidence of talent but as a failure of instruction. The barb isn’t aimed at reading popular books so much as at the cultural machinery that rewards them. In her view, the marketplace doesn’t merely discover literature; it manufactures it, often by indulging writers who were never forced to learn the hard disciplines of craft, taste, and thought.
The specific intent is double-edged. A "good teacher" doesn’t just correct grammar; they cultivate resistance to easy applause. O'Connor implies that many writers become publishable not because they have something urgent to say, but because no one with authority told them their habits were lazy, their insights thin, their sentences flabby. Prevention is the perfect verb: it recasts the teacher as a kind of public-health worker, stopping outbreaks of mediocrity before they spread to airport kiosks.
The subtext is O'Connor’s Catholic-tinged suspicion of comfort and uplift. She wrote in an era when creative writing programs were expanding and middlebrow prestige was booming; sincerity could be mistaken for depth, and moral lessons could substitute for artistic risk. Her own fiction is famously unsentimental, allergic to the therapeutic. So the line also reads as a warning to educators: teaching isn’t about validating expression; it’s about sharpening it until the writer can’t hide behind niceness, trendiness, or market logic.
It’s funny because it’s cruel, and it’s cruel because O'Connor cares about standards that the bestseller list is built to ignore.
The specific intent is double-edged. A "good teacher" doesn’t just correct grammar; they cultivate resistance to easy applause. O'Connor implies that many writers become publishable not because they have something urgent to say, but because no one with authority told them their habits were lazy, their insights thin, their sentences flabby. Prevention is the perfect verb: it recasts the teacher as a kind of public-health worker, stopping outbreaks of mediocrity before they spread to airport kiosks.
The subtext is O'Connor’s Catholic-tinged suspicion of comfort and uplift. She wrote in an era when creative writing programs were expanding and middlebrow prestige was booming; sincerity could be mistaken for depth, and moral lessons could substitute for artistic risk. Her own fiction is famously unsentimental, allergic to the therapeutic. So the line also reads as a warning to educators: teaching isn’t about validating expression; it’s about sharpening it until the writer can’t hide behind niceness, trendiness, or market logic.
It’s funny because it’s cruel, and it’s cruel because O'Connor cares about standards that the bestseller list is built to ignore.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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