There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.

I'm a full-time believer in writing habits...You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows awayOf course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that's all the energy I have, but I don't let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

Grace changes us and change is painful".

It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.

The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.

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 tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.