When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.
Flannery O'Connor
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
ability change truth
Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama.... Either one is serious about salvation or one is not. And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.
comedy belief soul universe drama salvation beliefs realize comical side seriousness
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
funny writers university opinion humour
There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
good teacher
Poorly written novelsno matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the charactersare not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.
good matter written behavior
When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.
vision talking shock beliefs hard relax normal hearing audience audiences
worry business book writer hands souls save god books
All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.
grace people action character history stories support hard hopeless
Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
art creativity limitations
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
effort reading writing art fiction craft understand
You do not write the best you can for the sake of art, but for the sake of returning your talent increased to the invisible God to use or not use as he sees fit.
talent art write invisible god
There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
talent writing nature art value fiction good gift on-fiction write vocation public excuse presence consumption
His friends told him that nobody was interested in his goddam soul unless it was the priest and he managed to answer that no priest taking orders from no pope was going to tamper with his soul. They told him he didn't have any soul and left for the brothel. He took a long time to believe them because he wanted to believe them. All he wanted was to believe them and get rid of it once and for all, and he saw opportunity here to get rid of it without corruption, to be converted to nothing instead of to evil. The army sent him halfway around the world and forgot him. He was wounded and they remembered him long enough to take the shrapnel out of his chest - they said they took it out but they never showed it to him and he felt it still in there, rusted, and poisoning him - and then they sent him to another desert and forgot him again. He had all the time he could want to study his soul in and assure himself that it was not there. When he was thoroughly convinced, he saw that this was something that he had always known.
opportunity time soul world friends evil army study corruption desert priest answer left atheism halfway
If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.
faith tolerance
The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.
funny
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