I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.

In my travels I am often asked if college stifles young writers. In my opinion, it doesn't stifle them enough.

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.

I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.

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.

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.