But learned people can analyze for me why I fear hell and their implication is that there is no hell. But I believe in hell. Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven. No doubt because hell is a more earth-seeming thing. I can fancy the tortures of the damned but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.

Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.

Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.

I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.