Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.

A God you understood would be less than yourself.

She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.

I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.

One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

Elizabeth Hardwick told me once that all her first drafts sounded as if a chicken had written them. So do mine for the most part.