Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[Skip Collins <skip.collins AT gmail.com>]

> "Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us
> something we know but don’t know that we know."

As with many pithy quotes found on the internet, I believe that this
is a paraphrase. I suspect the original source is what Percy said in
his interview with Zoltan Abadi-Nagy, which has been edited to be more
quotable.

Another famous quote that I came across, attributed to Flannery
O'Connor, seems like it might have influenced Percy's thinking:
"I write to discover what I know."

This is supposedly from The Habit of Being, a collection of O'Connor's
letters that Percy must have read. But when I went on Amazon to find
the quote, it did not show up in the search. It too appears to be a
cleaned up version of a less quotable passage from a letter she wrote
in 1948:
"I don't have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I
am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I
see what I say; then I have to say it over again."

This is more about her process of writing than some general theory of
coming to discover what she already knows through writing.

I would love to be proven wrong about both the Percy and O'Connor quotes.

-- 
skip