Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.

The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.

In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies.

The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.

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.