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 have what passes for an education in this day and time, but I am not deceived by it.

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.