Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

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

I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

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

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

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

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.

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

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

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

The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

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.

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.

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.

Doctors always think anybody doing something they arent is a quack also they think all patients are idiots.

Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.

Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.

...free will does not mean one will but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location

And their conviction is that if it is done with that kind of purity it will go somewhere. I believe that with all my heart, but I'm not responsible for its going somewhere.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Ronald Reagan's well documented final battles with Alzheimer's disease were fought with the same conviction and courage that his many public battles were fought.

Many hard comments have been made on my efforts in India from the side of the Congress party, yet I feel content in the deep conviction that the offer I traveled 22,000 miles to discuss with Indian leaders was a real contribution to a solution of our differences.

For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.

I was induced to establish several orders of merit, from conviction that emulation, well directed, becomes a useful servant; and, that the latent genius of some youth is more easily brought into action this way, than by the more sordid gratification of self-interest.

Music is a hobby, because I'm not making any money out of it, but I put just as much conviction into that as I do into my acting.

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

One of the dreariest spots on life's road is the point of conviction that nothing will ever again happen to you.

Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

It was very important that it be done in such a way that it be executed with complete conviction. If I had done it both ways, if I was trying to cover myself in case it didn't work, then it would have been to no purpose.