I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding...
Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.
Nothing needs to happen to a writer’s life after he or she is 20. By then, he or she has experienced more than enough to last their creative life.
The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery; that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.
Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.
There is a question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. I believe that we are ultimately directed Godward but that this journey is often impeded by emotion.
Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding.
It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.
Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.
It was not right to believe anything you couldn’t see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth.
Elizabeth Hardwick told me once that all her first drafts sounded as if a chicken had written them. So do mine for the most part.
The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.
You can’t clobber any reader while he’s looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.
The meaning of the story is the story.
Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.
Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.
I’m going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from, and no Redemption because there was no Fall, and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.
My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson’s blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her finger inside the cup.
The only way to the truth is through blasphemy.
There won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.