I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.

The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.

Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.

One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.

What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

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.

He knew that he was the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made and that he had turned his destiny as if with his bare will. He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness and when the time came for him to lose his balance he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.