“Conviction without experience makes for harshness. ”

“[W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”

“There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.”

“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.”

“The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.”

“For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.”

“Freedom is of no use without taste and without the ordinary competence to follow the particular laws of what we have been given to do.”