She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.

Harcourt sent my book to Evelyn Waugh and his comment was: “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.” My mother was vastly insulted. She put the emphasis on if and lady. Does he suppose you’re not a lady? she says.

A God you understood would be less than yourself.

Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.

There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.

He knew that he was the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made and that he had turned his destiny as if with his bare will. He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness and when the time came for him to lose his balance he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.

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.