Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!

She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint.

The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgement is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery.

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.

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.

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.