In my travels I am often asked if college stifles young writers. In my opinion, it doesn't stifle them enough.

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

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.

If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.

Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.

I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.

Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon It will keep you free - not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects around you.