Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.
A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.
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 be able to make it out of a lot.
When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he’s going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God.
There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.
Remember that you don’t write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.
It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.
She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.
Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.
She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint...
Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.
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.
A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.
Policy and politics generally go contrary to principle.
If we forget our past, we won’t remember our future and it will be as well because we won’t have one.
You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don’t, probably nobody else will.
Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.
I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity – what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.
It’s easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.