11 quotes
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)
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)
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)
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)