He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.

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

The life you save may very well be your own.

Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.

I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.

People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.

Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.