22 quotes
You weren't supposed to eat it. (year unkonwn)
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)
Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't write fiction. It isn't grand enough for you.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)
The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)
I believe that the basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation. ("The Teaching of Literature")
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)
Mrs. May's bedroom window was low and faced on the east and the bull, silvered in the moonlight, stood under it, his head raised as if he listened-like some patient god come down to woo her-for a stir inside the room.
The main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in real life. ("Catholic Novelists and their Readers")
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)
No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)
The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. (1958)
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. (1955)
One result of the stimulation of your intellectual life that takes place in college is usually a shrinking of the imaginative life. This sounds like a paradox, but I have often found it to be true.
to Alfred Corn (1962)
charity is beyond reason, and that God can be known through charity.
to Alfred Corn (1962)
Conviction without experience makes for harshness. (1955)
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location. ("The Regional Writer")
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)
About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do
to Alfred Corn (1962)
Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. (beginning of "Good Country People")
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955)
There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)
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. ("Writing Short Stories")
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)
I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are. ("Writing Short Stories")
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)