I don’t really think the standard of judgment, the missing link, you spoke of that you find in my stories emerges from any religion but Christianity, because it concerns specifically Christ and the In...
So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.
If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time you'll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.
Fiction is an art that calls for the strictest attention to the real - whether the writer is writing a naturalistic story or a fantasy. I mean that we always begin with what is or with what has an emi...
Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin.
Sin is a great thing as long as it's recognized. It leads a good many people to God who wouldn't get there otherwise.
Give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace.
Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses....
I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.
The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if...
She would have to be a saint because that was the occupation that included everything you could know; and yet she knew she would never be a saint.... but she thought she could be a martyr if they kill...
When we get our spiritual house in order, we'll be dead. This goes on. You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don't expect faith to clear things u...
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical posit...
If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by ten...
There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.
There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it.
I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really...
Conviction without experiences makes for harshness.