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.

You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.

Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

I spend three hours a day writing and the rest of my day getting over it.

A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us.

We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our turn to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite.