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.

If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.

Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.

We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.

...I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.

When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.

I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.