When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.

In most good stories, it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.

Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.

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.

If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.

the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.

Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.