The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery; that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.

I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

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.

It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.

Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.

I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.