I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individu...
Wesley, the younger child, had had rheumatic fever when he was seven and Mrs. May thought this was what had caused him to be an intellectual.
I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing.
It is generally supposed, and not least by Catholics, that the Catholic who writes fiction is out to use fiction to prove the truth of the Faith, or at the least, to prove the existence of the superna...
That's the trouble with you preachers, he said. You've all got too good to believe in anything, and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.
At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.
Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.
The trouble with the world was that nobody stopped or took any care.
There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful—the myth of the lonely writer, the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering...
That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.
His friends told him that nobody was interested in his goddam soul unless it was the priest and he managed to answer that no priest taking orders from no pope was going to tamper with his soul. They t...
If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.
The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election.
From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don’t look for what is hidden. It is a sign of maturity not to be...
I am often told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but als...
Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.