You can choose what you write but you can’t choose what you make live.
Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is, as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.
You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.
Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.
What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.
Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.
It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth.
Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.
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.
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.
I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.
I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.
You don’t serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I’ll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God. We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it.
Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.
The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
The life you save may very well be your own.
I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.
There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.