...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.

I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.

I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.

When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.

Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon It will keep you free - not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects around you.

... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.