Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.
I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.
Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.
Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.
Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.
She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint.
Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.
Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.
In my travels I am often asked if college stifles young writers. In my opinion, it doesn't stifle them enough.
I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.
...free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.
Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.
I am a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist, but like someone else would be an atheist.
Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are
The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.
The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.
She would of been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.
Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.
We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.
I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.
I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.
Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.
It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.
You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.
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.
Elizabeth Hardwick told me once that all her first drafts sounded as if a chicken had written them. So do mine for the most part.
What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity.
The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.
The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.” (August 9, 1955)
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.
It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.
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.
Nothing needs to happen to a writer’s life after they are 20. By then they’ve experienced more than enough to last their creative life.
We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.
Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.
Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.
I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.
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.
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it
Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.
When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.
There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.
The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.
My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her finger inside the cup.
One old lady who wants her head lifted wouldn't be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club.
Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.