The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

I do not know You, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man.

What they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.

With grown people, a road led either to heaven or hell, but with children there were always stops along the way where their attention could be turned with a trifle.

Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.

Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.

The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.

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.

I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.

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

Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol.

Her response was, If it's only a symbol, to hell with it.

Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.