The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.
Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.
The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees.
I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.
If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity.
I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.
Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.
One old lady who wants her head lifted wouldn’t be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club.
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.
In most good stories, it is the character’s personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.
When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.
Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!
I spend three hours a day writing and the rest of my day getting over it.
The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.
I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.
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.
It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.
Success means being heard and don’t stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.
In my travels I am often asked if college stifles young writers. In my opinion, it doesn’t stifle them enough.