We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.

the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

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.

Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

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.