Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.

I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.

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.

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.

I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

I have what passes for an education in this day and time, but I am not deceived by it.

There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.