The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

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.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

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.

You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself.