All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.
Kindness and patience were always called for...
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.
The Bible was the only book he read. He didn’t read it often but when he did he wore his mother’s glasses. They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always obliged to stop.
Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.
She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.
I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.
The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.
Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven’t the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are.
In the first place you can be so absolutely honest and so absolutely wrong at the same time that I think it is better to be a combination of cautious and polite.
No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.
Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.
Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren’t is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.
I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.
When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.
Harcourt sent my book to Evelyn Waugh and his comment was: “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.” My mother was vastly insulted. She put the emphasis on if and lady. Does he suppose you’re not a lady? she says.
A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us.
I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.
A God you understood would be less than yourself.