“Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”

“Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.”

“In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgement is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery...”

“Woman! do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!”

“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways 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.”

“We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.”

“I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.”