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

But learned people can analyze for me why I fear hell and their implication is that there is no hell. But I believe in hell. Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven. No doubt because hell is a more earth-seeming thing. I can fancy the tortures of the damned but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God.

Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.

Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.

You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will.

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

Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.