There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.

People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.

Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

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

The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.

Once the process [of conversion] is begun and continues...you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity...you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to turn away from it. I measure God by everything I am not. I begin with that.