All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

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

In the first place you can be so absolutely honest and so absolutely wrong at the same time that I think it is better to be a combination of cautious and polite

I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.

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.

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.

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