I have 50 or 60 pages on the [new] novel but I still expect to be a long time at it. It’s a theme that requires prayer and fasting to make it get anywhere. I manage to pray but am a very sloppy faster...
I don’t know how to cure the source-itis except to tell you that I can discover a good many possible sources myself for Wise Blood but I am often embarrassed to find that I read the sources after I ha...
I am the menial, at the beck and squawk of any feathered worthy who wants service.
I am largely worried about wingless chickens. I feel this is the time for me to fulfill myself by stepping in and saving the chicken but I don't know how exactly since I am not bold. I only know I bel...
I am going to be the World Authority on Peafowl, and I hope to be offered a chair some day at the Chicken College.
He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.
He groaned to see that she was off on that topic. She rolled into it every few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact poi...
Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things. However,
All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching...
I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.
You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody else, he said, but you ain’t! I’m the one has it. Not you. Me. Haze didn’t say anything. He stood there for an instant, small in the
Who’s there? the voice from inside said and there was a quality about it now that seemed final. The knob rattled and the voice said peremptorily, Who’s there, I ast you? Parker bent down and put his m...
Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited.
The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his e...
The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t b...
The dead are a heap more trouble than the living.
She had managed after he died to get the two of them through college and beyond; but she had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room scho...
Poorly written novels -- no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters -- are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.
Listen, friends, said the disciple confidently, [...] I didn't have a friend in the world. Do you know what it's like not to have a friend in the world?It ain't no worsen havinum that would put a kni...