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

We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.

He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

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 main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.