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

You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.

Nothing needs to happen to a writer’s life after they are 20. By then they’ve experienced more than enough to last their creative life.

I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.

A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.

On the subject of the feminist business, I just never think...of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I suppose I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex. Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome.