Novelists From The United States

"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 in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian scepticism. 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 of those around you."

"...Men and women do not write differently. In the United States, for example, the best of contemporary prose-writers is a woman - Flannery O'Connor - recently deceased."

"Every young writer should read Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find at least three or four times. If you’ve ever thought creativity was opposed to clarity, or that funny stories aren’t serious, or that stories about abnormal people are about abnormal people, or that the road to the realistic was through realism—O’Connor is here to disabuse you, with pleasure. And do take note of her characterization and story structure, too! Textbook."

"If you want your faith, you have to work for it. It is a gift, but for very few is it a gift given without any demand for equal time devoted to its cultivation. For every book you read that is anti-Christian, make it your business to read one that presents the other side of the picture; if one isn't satisfactory read others. Don't think that you I have to abandon reason to be a Christian. A book that might help you is The Unity of Philosophical Experience by Etienne Gilson. Another is Newman's The Grammar of Assent. To find out about faith, you have to go to the people who have it and you have to go to the most intelligent ones"

"I can think of no American writer who has made a more devastating use of existential intuition. She does so, of course, without declamation, without program, without distributing manifestoes, and without leading a parade."

"charity is beyond reason, and that God can be known through charity."

"About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do"

"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."

"Faith is what you have in the absence of knowledge. The reason this clash doesn't bother me any longer is because I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can't fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories. I might suggest that you look into some of the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenom of Man et al.). He was a paleontologist-helped to discover Peking man-and also a man of God. I don't suggest you go to him for answers but for different questions, for that stretching of the imagination that you need to make you a sceptic in the face of much that you are learning, much of which is new and shocking but which when boiled down becomes less so and takes its place in the general scheme of things."

"It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them - in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries. (1956)"

"The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it....If you manage to use it successfully for social, religious, or other purposes, it is because you make it art first. (1956)"

"I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both. (1956)"

"All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. (1958)"

"The short story writer particularly has to learn to read life in a way that includes the most possibilities--like the medieval commentators on scripture, who found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text. If you see things in depth, you will be more liable to write them that way. (1959)"

"The Negro will in the matter of a few years have his constitutional rights and we will all then see that the business of getting along with each other is much the same as it has always been, even though new manners are called for. The fiction writer is interested in individuals, not races; he knows that good and evil are not apportioned along racial lines and when he deals with topical matters, if he is any good, he sees the long run through the short run. (1963)"

"I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times. (1959)"

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. (1955)"

"...to know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility, and this is not a virtue conspicuous in any national character. ("The Fiction Writer & His Country")"

"He liked parades with floats full of Miss Americas and Miss Daytona Beaches and Miss Queen Cotton Products. He didn't have any use for processions and a procession full of schoolteachers was about as deadly as the River Styx to his way of thinking. ("A Late Encounter with the Enemy")"

"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."

"There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. ("Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction")"

"When people can have pretty much whatever they want for the asking, and when privacy and security can be assured by the same technologies...well, pretty soon no one needs a government for much."

"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")"

"“I’m sure you’ll figure out how to make a system of simple laws that work.” “Yes, right after the perpetual motion machine I’m patenting,” he said cheerfully."

"“So,” Simon said slowly, looking around at the others, “the Leader of Humanity is going to risk herself on a ship with a sometimes devious ally, traveling to some secret destination in the Deeps of the Arena, to confront some nameless force where there won’t even be a Sky Gate to help us return if things go wrong?” He stood and lifted his glass. “Sign me up, Captain!”"

"Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. Buford had come along about noon and when he left at sundown, the boy, Tarwater, had never returned from the still."

"Conviction without experience makes for harshness. (1955)"

"“Though I hope we get out more, the Arena looks fascinating and all this talk-talk-talk is making me itchy, and no one’s tried to kill the captain yet!” Orphan gave a subdued buzz-chuckle. “One would almost think you want her to be attacked.” “Well, of course! What use being a bodyguard if you never actually get to do any WORK?”"

"I cannot help but think that anyone who wants power for those reasons really is not the person I want to have it."

"“Although I cannot pretend it is merely a social visit.” “Of course—and in truth, I would be disappointed if it were! You have so much to learn, as do we, and to waste that time merely on formalities?”"

"It almost sounds romantic, in a facing-execution-together sort of way."

"Maybe you should’ve been more careful, but hindsight’s perfect and we aren’t."

"A committee’s a good way to end up with a lot of talk and no action."

"His hand contracted on the odd carven rod, a tiny thing that glittered with hints of lights and circuits and, at the same time, bone and gems, a wand constructed by an engineer, or a transmitter assembled by a shaman."

"They have certain rather insular attitudes which makes it difficult to maintain any long-term cooperation. It is not pleasant to work with someone who thinks of your entire species as a waste of resources."

"Well, like many fanatic creeds, if you accept the basic postulates, you can make a twisted sense out of anything."

"I will admit that I have not heard that he would directly violate his word or go back on a bargain, though he is certainly more than capable of obfuscation and creative interpretation where it suits him."

"In safety and in security, in peril and plague, in victory and vengeance, may your course be ever your own."

"“But there has to be an alternative.” “Why does there have to be one, Captain Austin?” Sethrik asked quietly. “Often the universe does not give us choices.”"

"Your problem, you pea-brained, overbearing, pompous crayfish, is that you think you have any idea of what you’re dealing with."

"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")"

"But you know there’s always that nagging set of voices out there worried that someone is doing something bad with that freedom—and of course the problem is, sometimes they’re right."

"I am a scientist. I do not believe in gods or demons."

"People don’t mind poking into other people’s business—they just don’t want other people poking into theirs."

"If you’re a sensible man, you get in the habit of being very cautious of making extreme pronouncements when one’s in the sciences, especially when it’s not your core field."

"Hmph. Just remembered that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent— Yeah, Duquesne interrupted with a grin, because the competent resort to violence MUCH sooner, before it’s too late!"

"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")"

"There is nothing inherent in being a minority that says you can’t have everything you want."

"I want us to understand that those who are on the sidelines, those who find their voices muted or find their voices actually silenced have power. And there is no more profound power in a democracy than the power to vote."

"Part of our leadership is understanding that you can’t change what other people think of you, but you can change how you react to their thinking and how you respond to it."