The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development.

Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.

... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

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

I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.

The reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.