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

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

"He has the mistaken notion that a concern with grace is a concern with exalted human behavior, that it is a pretentious concern. It is, however, simply a concern with the human reaction to that which, instant by instant, gives life to the soul. It is a concern with a realization that breeds charity and with the charity that breeds action. Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence."

"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."

"When we get our spiritual house in order, we'll be dead. This goes on. You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don't expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty."

"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."

"It makes a great difference to the look of a novel whether its author believes that the world came late into being and continues to come by a creative act of God, or whether he believes that the world and ourselves are the product of a cosmic accident. It makes a great difference to his novel whether he believes that we are created in God's image, or whether he believes we create God in our own. It makes a great difference whether he believes that our wills are free, or bound like those of the other animals."

"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."

"The theologian is interested specifically in the modern novel because there he sees reflected the man of our time, the unbeliever, who is nevertheless grappling in a desperate and usually honest way with intense problems of the spirit."

"Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing."

"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."

"I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing."

"Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched."

"People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them."

"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."

"Lord, I believe; help my unbelief'... is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith."

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

"Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other."

"From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don't look for what is hidden. It is a sign of maturity not to be scandalized and to try to find explanations in charity."

"There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence."

"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."

"Hazel Motes sat at a forward angel on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car."

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

"My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be."

"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."

"The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater."

"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."

"When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost."

"We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge."

"Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited."

"Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me."

"And if the student finds that this is not to his taste well that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted it is being formed."

"There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

"When something is finished, it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be possessed but the struggle."

"Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them."

"I came from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation."

"The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live."

"I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn't just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down."