"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."

"In yourself right now is all the place you've got."

"When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."

"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

"It is when the individual's faith is weak, not strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the supernatural is apt gradually to be lost."

"The writer who position is Christian, and probably also the writer whose position is not, will begin to wonder at this point if there could not be some ugly correlation between our unparalleled prosperity and the stridency of these demands for a literature that shows us the joy of life. He may at least be permitted to ask if these screams for joy would be quite so piercing if joy were really more abundant in our prosperous society."

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."

"Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not."

"If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now."

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

"Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it."

"The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development."

"At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily."

"You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd."

"It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have."

"If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber."

"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."

"For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified."

"If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time you'll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival."

"Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character."

"I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it."

"The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty in the process as possible."

"I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music."

"The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention."

"When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist."

"The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence."

"Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them."

"To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks."

"A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him."

"I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it's perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction."

"His plate was full but his fists sat motionless like two dark quartz stones on either side of it."

"Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin."

"I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial."

"I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best."

"What one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness."

"Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better."

"Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack."

"So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence."

"When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville."

"To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness."

"I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one."

"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."

"He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, 'I ain't got any tattoo on my back.''What you got on it?' the girl said.'My shirt,' Parker said. 'Haw.''Haw, haw,' the girl said politely."

"The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth."

"If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you."

"The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode."

"I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway less burdened."

"The writer has no rights at all except those he forges for himself inside his own work. We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties, or on the notion that fiction must represent the typical, that in the public mind the deeper kinds of realism are less and less understandable."

"When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business."