Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.

Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.

Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.

I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which is both natural and supernatural--understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.

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.