The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

A God you understood would be less than yourself.

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.

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

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she liver with, her only boy.

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.

The life you save may very well be your own.