It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.

A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us.

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

It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

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.