It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them - in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries.

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.

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

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

You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will.

The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.

Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.